


Here We Go Now One More Time

by Infinite_Monkeys



Series: Fun With Time Loops [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Basically All The Trauma Be Warned, Dark Humor, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempts, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Other Characters but the Cast Varies from Chapter to Chapter, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:08:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 60,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24338659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infinite_Monkeys/pseuds/Infinite_Monkeys
Summary: Loki's tried winning. He's tried losing. All his efforts have ever accomplished is to forestall the inevitable.There's really only one thing left to do.He needs to kill Thanos.
Series: Fun With Time Loops [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1272089
Comments: 730
Kudos: 810





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! It turns out I did not write the cheerful time-travel fix-it I imagined when I left the ending of the last fic open. Instead, I wrote more time loops and suffering. Hope you enjoy. 
> 
> Additional Chapter warnings are in the end notes! But pretty much expect lots of bad decisions and messed up mental and emotional states for this entire fic. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to the incredible worstloki, who gave fantastic suggestions for how to improve this story and fixed many, many typos! 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

Loki stood in the bunker illuminated with the cold glow of the Space Stone, with the ghostly memory of a hand still lingering on his throat, and he _laughed_. 

“Sir,” Fury repeated, “I need you to drop the weapon. Now.” 

Loki didn't answer. He grinned and rolled his shoulders, taking a deep breath that felt cleaner, freer than any he'd had since the Kursed's blade had made a mess of scar tissue out of his lungs. The stinging, half-healed cuts from fighting Hela's warriors were gone as well, and with them the suffocating guilt of having destroyed his world. He still ached from his time with Thanos, a deep hurt that the years had only begun to heal, but it could have been worse. Had been worse. 

A tugging sensation in the back of his mind snapped his train of thought and drew him back to the present. Yes, that spell, Thanos' hateful little safeguard against betrayal, rooted by the Mind Stone and tangled up with his thoughts like the roots of a weed. Last time the Hulk had broken it (and almost broken Loki's skull with it), but surely there had to be an easier way. 

A blow to the head… he held his breath because could it be that easy? The voices of the mortals chattering in the background grew more alarmed as he gripped the staff tighter and raised it up. 

Feeling somewhat silly, he raised the staff and, without hesitating, hit himself in the head with as much force as he could manage. 

It didn't work. The spell jarred but stayed, and a new wave of pain pulsed and throbbed inside his skull. He grabbed the Tesseract to shut it up and used magic to pull himself outside to someplace relatively quiet.

A second later he remembered that the compound was set to explode, and he gritted his teeth. Heads snapped around in alarm as he reappeared in their midst for just a second, just long enough to shut down the energy buildup from the portal's collapse before he vanished once more. 

There. Let them make of that what they would.

He looked up at the spot his instinctive mind had chosen and grimaced. The rolling green and muted sunshine would have been relaxing, had they not come accompanying bitter memories he'd rather leave buried. 

Still, it seemed as good a spot as any to sit and wait. He found a suitable rock and sat facing the cliffs, staring out at the ocean and watching the waves break over the rocks. Again and again they rushed the shoreline, and again they were dashed to pieces, a never ending cycle of futility. It itched against his brain, and he was relatively certain that wasn't due to one of Thanos' spells tangled in his memory. 

Yet he knew, intellectually, that eventually the waves would wear down the rocks. Perhaps on his own lifetime, even, if he could ever get on with it. 

He didn't expect the Avengers to find him first. Or, rather, a fraction of them—Stark and the Captain and the two spies. Stark touched down, the heat from his thrusters burning a scar on the otherwise pristine hillside, and Rogers hit seconds later, rolling out of his fall as though he had leapt in dramatically to save the day from whatever disaster would ensue were Stark allowed to speak for their group. The spies touched down more sensibly, waiting until their craft reached the ground to disembark. 

“You have something that doesn't belong to you,” Rogers said cautiously, and he snorted, but didn't say that the Tesseract had been Odin's and Asgard's long before their grubby little mortal hands had claimed it in their unfoundedly proprietary way. 

He didn't bother, because the wind had picked up in a way that told him he'd soon have the chance to let another explain it, inevitably with much less diplomacy and more shouting than he'd have chosen. 

He stood, and the Midgardians took a step back and raised their weapons (or shield, in Rogers' case) as he looked to the sky. The vortex of dark energy that funneled from the clouds touched down and retreated, leaving Thor standing before him. 

The wave of emotion that broke over him at seeing his brother almost knocked him off his feet. The relief alone hit like a punch to the gut, because the last he'd seen of Thor had been a single panicked eye as his brother watched him die, again, helpless like Thor should never be, and before that squirming in the grip of the Mad Titan, the power of the first stone burning under his skin. There was affection, too; he'd pretended indifference too often not to recognize it as a lie. 

But underneath that ran a current of disappointment, because this was not the Thor he'd left. That Thor had grown in his suffering, or they'd grown together, and in a small way he felt like the brother he'd reconciled with had died. And deeper still burned a hot undercurrent of anger; that Thor should have the luxury of forgetting and returning, unchanged, to his golden and untarnished self, shedding the scars on his soul like water. 

(And how little sense did that make, to be angry with Thor for being _whole_ when he'd hated with every fiber of his being to see him broken?)

And a very small part of him wanted to run to Thor and catch him up in an embrace, to spill out all he knew of what could be, to allow Thor to _take care of it_ like, perhaps, a big brother ought. His pride recoiled from the thought, but a part of him wanted it all the same. 

Thor didn't notice, or else he could not decipher the wash of emotions (and how could he? Even Loki could not pick them apart) and so chose to ignore them. His voice was a low growl. 

“Loki.”

He took a deep breath, and even he wasn't sure what would come out when he answered. “You need to bash my skull in with that stupid hammer.”

“If that's what it takes to stop you,” Thor said, hefting it meaningfully. “Though I'd rather it didn't come to that.”

“You misunderstand,” Loki said through gritted teeth. “I am asking you to.” He took a step forward, and with an effort of will allowed his hands to fall to his side, fingers spread and unthreatening. The faint threads of the spell laced through his mind started to hum at an irritating frequency that felt like sandpaper on skin. 

Thor eyed him warily, and he half-lifted Mjolnir to hold it in front of him as though readying a defense, but Loki kept his arms still. “Well, what are you waiting for? Hit me, brother.”

“I won't,” Thor said, as though he existed just to be contrary. 

Faster than a striking snake, Loki reached out and wrapped his hands not around the hammer that would reject him as unworthy, but around Thor's wrist. He couldn't lift the cursed hammer, but he was nothing if not a creative thinker. If he couldn't hit himself in the head with Mjolnir, he could hit Mjolnir with his head. 

He kept his hold even as Thor, confused, tried to pull away, drew back, and smashed his forehead against the head of the hammer as hard as he was able. 

The impact left him staggering and with a ringing sound in his left ear, but he could still feel the spell, writhing in discomfort underneath his skull. He held his head and groaned. 

“I didn't do that,” Thor said uneasily, as though they were still children and he worried someone would run off and tattle to their mother. “You all saw. He hit himself on his own.” 

“Because you are too useless to do so when I tell you to!” He staggered again as the pain from the spell started to build. “Just hit me and be done with it.”

Thor's expression shifted from one type of unease to another, and his eyes clouded with concern. Loki didn't have _time_ for this. 

It sent a sour feeling twisting in the pit of his stomach, but as the pain worsened he took a deep breath and shifted his skin, allowing his disguise of centuries to fade away. “Perhaps this will be easier for you,” he said, and spread his arms, now blue and adorned with thin, intricate lines. “Perhaps this is a face you'll feel more comfortable smashing in.”

“Loki, I— _no_ ,” he said, shaking his head even harder although his face had gone colorless. “I won't. This changes nothing.”

The pain pounded against his skull, now, and everything flared white for short seconds in time with his pulse. “Why are you being difficult?” he shouted, and took another step closer. “Strike me down!”

“And your journey toward the dark side will be complete,” Stark intoned from somewhere nearby. Loki held up a finger in the man's direction without bothering to turn and face him. 

“Now is not the time for Star Wars, Stark,” he said. “Shut up.”

“Cranky, someone is,” Stark said, and before he could help it he had spun around, holding the tip of a dagger pointed exactly at the man' s throat. 

A blow like an explosion rained down from behind him, and the world shuttered to darkness. 

* * *

“Ow,” Loki said when he woke, or tried to. The infuriating muzzle from his first defeat kept it from being more than a wordless moan. He tried to sit up, but the chains, too, were back. 

The spell, though, had broken with the blow that knocked him unconscious. Small mercies. 

His vision drifted back into focus only to show him Thor's face, uncomfortably close and grim. He groaned again. 

“Loki,” Thor said, his tone commanding. Imperious, even. That, he hadn't missed. “Where is the Tesseract?” 

He stared, reasonably comfortable in his ability to communicate how much of an idiot Thor was with only his eyes. The message found its target, or else Thor had realized his own mistake. 

“If I take this off,” he said, his tone a warning, “you must not attempt to harm any here using magic.” 

He rolled his eyes, regretting it instantly when the motion amplified the pain throbbing through his skull. 

The gag disengaged with a subtle click, and he worked his jaw the second it was free, noting with dismay the ache that had already developed in the small muscles. 

“I missed you too,” he said as soon as he could speak. If his voice didn't have quite the bite he would've wanted it to, well, he'd blame that on the conflicted emotions still swirling like a maelstrom in his chest. 

Thor's expression clouded instantly. “Of course I—Loki, I thought you dead!” 

The instinctive, biting reply from before sprung to his lips— _did you mourn?_ —but he swallowed it down. He still remembered Svartalfheim, Thor's wracking sobs as he pulled Loki close, held him as he'd (nearly) died. 

“Thor,” he said carefully, because the memory only served to remind him that the future stood before him once more, and still needed to be addressed. He'd thought himself past the loop, last time, but Thanos had won his victory eventually after all. Stopping him would take more than shutting down his invasion of New York, it seemed. “Do you trust me?”

Thor frowned. “You have given me little reason to. A moment ago you tried to attack this mortal, and before that you sought to provoke me into doing you harm.” 

“I wouldn't have killed him,” Loki said. “Stark is merely an annoyance, nothing more.” 

“Hey!” Stark's indignance nearly set his eyes rolling again. “First of all, ouch, and secondly, I don't know if I should be concerned or flattered that the invading aliens know who I am.”

“Who is this, and why won't he shut up?” Thor asked, clearly irritated. 

Stark's mouth, visible through the open faceplate of his armor, opened and closed silently. 

“I will not remove the chains without some assurance that you will return with me to Asgard,” Thor said stubbornly, turning back to Loki. 

“I won't,” he said, crossing his arms. The mortals were staring, but he couldn't be bothered to care. 

“Loki—” 

“The Allfather would simply lock me away,” he said, allowing his anger to burn through the words. “I will _not_ be subject to his abandonment.” _Not again_. 

“He wouldn't.” 

Loki gritted his teeth. He'd almost forgotten the brash self-assurance of this Thor, the utter and unearned conviction that whatever idea he conceived of at a given moment was unassailable in its accuracy. 

He forced himself to relax, and curiosity tugged at him despite himself. Curiosity, and a sudden, pressing need to see Asgard, to prove to himself that it still existed. “Then you won't mind making a wager,” he said easily. Thor frowned, apparently rightfully unsettled by his sudden shift to a more pleasant tone. “I will return with you on one condition only. You will stand by my side through whatever mockery of a trial I am offered, and if the Allfather does not greet me with the concern of a father for a lost son, if he sentences me to rot away in a prison in the bowels of Asgard,” he drew out the words, then looked up and straight into Thor's eyes. “Then you will kill me where I stand. Strike me down before I have a chance to waste away into madness. I would prefer a swift death to the loss of my freedom.” He kept his voice and expression calm, even as the Midgardians stiffened. 

What a bizarre show this must be for them, hovering uncomfortably on the sidelines. No wonder they were so uncharacteristically quiet. 

“Loki.” Thor's face was stricken. “You cannot ask of me that I would—” 

“If you were being truthful with me earlier,” he said, “if you truly believe that Odin will welcome me back and not issue such a sentence, then it is no issue, is it? It shall only come to such a thing if I am right. Are you admitting the possibility?”

“No,” Thor said after a moment, though he still looked uneasy. “No, you are right. Father would not do such a thing.” 

“So you're agreeing to my terms?” 

Thor's face spasmed, but then he steadied himself. “I do not think that is necessary.” 

“I do. Or do you forget that I am the one with the means to bring us back?” 

“Yeah, speaking of.” That was Barton. “We're gonna need the Tesseract back. You guys don't get to just steal it and run off.” 

“Yes,” Thor said, ignoring the mortals and focused only on Loki. “I agree to your terms.” 

“And?” 

“I swear on the Nine that should our father sentence you to an indefinite imprisonment—though I am certain he shall not—I shall...do as you have asked.” He said the words reluctantly, and grimaced as though they left behind a foul aftertaste. 

“Very well then. We shall soon see.” 

He summoned the Tesseract, slammed it into the channeling device Thor had brought, and ignored the shouting of the mortals as it pulled the two of them back to Asgard. 

* * *

Asgard's return to its former resplendence didn't hit him quite the same way as seeing Thor. Here, he felt neither jealousy nor affection, just a strange mix of dissonance and relief. Ragnarok had left him no time to ponder what of his former home had been shaped by Hela and Odin's shared legacy, but he found himself wondering now. 

He thought of it through the streets, no longer burned by Surtur's flames, and then from the gilded marble arches of the palace courtyard to the room with Odin's enormous throne. 

Frigga's presence caught him off guard, twisting in his heart like a wrenched knife. It shouldn't have: he remembered seeing her the first time, asking her _have I made you proud?_

He had so many questions he'd rather ask now, so many things he'd like to say, that they all choked each other off like a bottleneck, keeping him silent. And then he had missed his chance, because Odin had dismissed her and she left, again like before. 

It shouldn't have hurt as badly as it did. 

Loki pulled himself back together and stood before Asgard's throne, back straight. No chains bound him this time, but Thor's harsh grip on his arm served the same function. He was humored, not trusted. 

“My son,” Odin began, and Loki had to swallow back the lump in his throat when it was clear that Odin addressed only Thor. “You are dismissed. Leave us.”

“I cannot leave now without breaking a sworn oath,” Thor said, standing stiffly beside him. Odin raised an eyebrow, but said nothing further to him. 

Instead, he turned his attention to Loki, his one eye cold and hard. Loki swallowed as Odin began speaking, his words so very much like they had been at his first trial. 

He didn't know why he expected otherwise. The softness he had shown after his own banishment, _I love you my sons_ , had lulled him into a false sense of security, made him _hope_. He should've known it was a lie of convenience, just like all the others he'd been fed over the years. 

His heart dropped when the speech met its predestined end, Odin's cold voice declaring “and you shall live out the rest of your days in a cell,” but it wasn't until he glanced to the side that he realized Thor had gone entirely colorless, swaying a little where he stood. “Father,” he said, his voice barely audible in the great echoing hall. “Surely you don't mean that.” 

“I think he made his meaning perfectly clear,” Loki said, keeping his tone light. “Well then, Thunderer? It is time to discharge your oath.” 

Thor met his eyes, and the stark _terror_ there almost inspired him to sympathy. Thor looked like he might be sick, and he staggered as though his legs were no longer willing to hold him, knowing what he must do. 

“No,” Thor whispered, and shook his head wildly. “No, I cannot.” 

“You haven't a choice,” Loki snarled at him, feeling a new wave of panic rising in his chest. There were many things he could do. Going back to that cell—he was unwilling. “You swore an _oath_.”

One oversized hand came up, but instead of reaching for Mjolnir Thor only scrubbed at his own face, at the tears flowing freely over his cheeks. “I cannot,” he said again. “I'm sorry, but I cannot.” 

At some signal from Odin, or perhaps merely growing impatient with the delay, the guards moved forward, making as though to drag him off to his prison. “You _coward_ ,” Loki screamed. “You are a _liar_ and an oathbreaker, Odinson!” 

Thor shook his head, and watched with a shattered expression as they shackled Loki and dragged him towards the door. 

He knew more about the cuffs that held him now than he had last time. Posing as Odin had given him plenty of time to study them and ensure they'd never be used to keep him helpless again. 

Strength couldn't break them, at least not the strength of the Aesir. Neither could his magic; their design specifically trapped all energy, kept it useless and directed inwards. But they could not destroy it. Energy didn't _work_ that way, so if it could not be directed outward, it did damage to what it _could_ reach. 

He drew forth all the energy from within him that he could muster, and poured it into a spell with nowhere to go. It might have been him screaming as the energy consumed him, or it might have been others in the room, but it didn't matter because a second later he stood back in the underground bunker from before, at the beginning of the loop, breathing heavily. 

Well, that had been unpleasant but not entirely useless. Two of his theories had been confirmed; for one, Odin (not his father) had been as unforgiving as he remembered, despite all that came after, and he had little to no chance of finding aid in Asgard. 

Second, and perhaps more important, his return to this point confirmed that even without his intervention, with no Loki to steal the Tesseract from the Vault or banish Odin or any of the other things he had done that might cause disaster, Thanos still won. Sooner or later, inaction would lead to eventual but inevitable defeat and the universe in the grip of a mad tyrant. 

That conclusion left him one option, and one option only. One possibility only that led somewhere other than ruin and repetition. 

So long as Thanos lived and schemed, the fate of the world was set, all of them destined for eventual but inevitable destruction. 

Loki needs to figure out how to kill a Titan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for suicide, kinda? It's in the context of dying on purpose to reset a time loop.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On to the shenanigans! Warnings again for major character death in the context of a time loop. 
> 
> Once again, incredibly many thanks to the fantastic worstloki, whose help with this story was invaluable! 
> 
> And a huge thank you as well to all the people reading and leaving kudos and comments! I love hearing your thoughts and I appreciate all the encouragement. Hope you enjoy the update. :)

Loki stashed the Tesseract and collapsed the portal, then pulled himself to the top of Stark's tower. The idea had occurred to him after the last fiasco, and he stood to lose nothing in the attempt. 

His heels found the edge of the building, and he took a deep breath before he looked up to the sky and toppled over the edge. 

It took a good few seconds to fall, with the wind rushing past him and an odd hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach that screamed to him he'd made a mistake. Then the ground was there, all at once, jarring with the sickening crunch of broken bones as the impact drove the breath out of his lungs. 

The pain made everything hazy, but not so much that he couldn't feel Thanos' spell snap and break as it had during his encounter with the Hulk or Thor's attack with Mjolnir. He dragged his eyes open and a mortal screamed. 

“No, I'll be fine,” he said, slurring the words a bit, and the screaming faded to some panicked fussing. “Just give me a second.” 

He managed to pull one arm out of the concrete and levered himself up onto one elbow. The mortals buzzed like flies overhead, and one of them attempted to push him back down. 

He brushed them away, then managed to work his knees underneath him before pushing, unsteadily, to his feet. 

“Sir,” someone said, “you need to stay still. I've called an ambulance, and now we need to wait—”

He tuned them out. He needed a plan, or at least something in the direction of one, because killing Thanos wouldn't be easy. _Might not even be possible_ , a small, tired part of his brain insisted, but he shut it down. 

Well, he could cross ‘stab him with a tiny knife’ off the list of things to try. The thought brought a near-hysterical giggle to his lips, which sent a sharp, reprimanding stab of pain through his healing ribs. No, he hadn't expected that to work, wasn't sure why he'd _tried_ it except that the situation had gotten wildly out of hand and he'd needed something, anything, to derail it from a path that left Thor dead and him trapped once again under Thanos' thumb. 

He couldn't even say that it had worked; for all he knew Thanos had killed Thor a second after his neck snapped. But at least he didn't have to see it. At least that wasn't one more image to stain his soul and serve as kindling and fodder for his nightmares. 

Whether he had lived or died, though, Thor had lost. Otherwise, the loop would never have reset. Defeating Thanos would require someone stronger than Thor, more capable of dealing out death and destruction, and Loki was not foolish enough or vain enough to think that could be him. 

One of the mortals touched him, an irritating hand on his shoulder, and it snapped his attention back to the present. 

“Sir,” she said, “can you tell me your name?” 

“That's not important.” He took a deep breath, steadying himself, pulling together the fragments of a truly terrible plan. 

“My friend here is telling me you jumped off this building.” The woman nodded to the tower, keeping her voice pitched somewhere nebulously between patronizing friendliness and genuine concern. She wore some sort of uniform, plain and utilitarian, and he recognized it as such only because of the two other identically dressed mortals hovering nearby. Healers? Keepers of the law? Perhaps something in between? “Can you tell me what you remember?” 

“That is correct. I have no need for your services, though,” he added. “I am fine.”

A frown creased her forehead. “Can you tell me why you jumped off the building?” 

The question didn't make much sense—he couldn't see why she would have any interest in the answer, until it struck him. “You are concerned I intended to arrange a brush with death.” 

She looked reluctant to answer the question, possibly out of fear of offending him. “That's one of the things we're concerned about.” 

He allowed himself a small smile. “Well,” he said. “I suppose you're half right.” 

* * *

Loki hated the next part of the plan very much. 

Hela existed. That much he knew. She was currently trapped in a prison of Odin's making. That he also knew. 

But the location of the prison? He had no idea. Odin had been thorough in erasing the records of his oldest child, or, at least, thorough enough that Loki had been able to find nothing but the shape of the gap she left behind during his time impersonating the Allfather. Her name had not so much been struck from the histories as completely overwritten, like an artist reusing an old canvas. 

Odin's death would most likely release her, but that, too, carried its own slew of problems. After all, a newly-freed Hela had not seemed eager to listen the last time he'd met her, and if she were already free he had nothing to offer her, no chip with which to bargain. No, simply releasing Hela would almost certainly not end well, for Loki or Asgard or anyplace else that stood in her way when she inevitably set out on a rampage of conquest and rage. 

Beyond that, though, the thought of killing Odin set something twisting and clawing inside his chest. Even knowing that they shared no blood, no affection, no bond but the lies that had chained and contained him for most of his life, the thought set a sick feeling rising in his throat. 

No. Odin had condemned him, buried him, not only entertained the idea of his execution but resolved upon it before Frigga stayed his hand, but Loki could not find it in himself to do the same. 

_And what does it say of you, old man, that you care less for loyalty and family than the monster you raised?_

So then, if he would not kill Odin, he needed information. The location of Hela's prison, the mechanism by which she might be released, any information about her beyond what could be gathered from the wrong end of one of her cursed blades. The person most likely to have this knowledge was also, unfortunately, the person least likely to give it to him. 

Not willingly, at least. He'd learned more about extracting information from the unwilling in the time since his fall than he'd ever wanted to know. 

The Tesseract took him to Asgard at his command. To his knowledge, he had shielded himself from the eyes of the Gatekeeper, and if Heimdall did not know he survived, then it was likely no one else did, either. None would be watching for him, none would bother to be on guard against a dead man. A ghost, or nearly so. 

He felt like one, too, as he crept down the halls. Asgard had a surreal cast for him, now, both familiar and strange. It was like revisiting a childhood haunt as an adult; nothing had changed except him, but still everything felt smaller, duller, complicated by knowledge he hadn't been burdened with before. 

All the gold, all the opulence and splendor had been paid for in blood, and that blood had been shed by the man he planned to confront and the monster he would release. This was a very, very bad plan. 

The halls and their decorations were accented in black, festooned in ribbons and cloth, signs of mourning. They weren't new. The cloth had worn, as grief did, and were more subtle touches than the full-on display that directly followed a tragedy. They were present in the lives of the people who lived here but did not cover it, not anymore.

He searched his memory for what they could be for and came up blank until he realized they must be for him. The royal household had lost a member a scant year ago, and on the scale of their lifetimes that was hardly a moment. Odin must have found it easier, then, to officially mourn than to explain Loki's treachery and subsequent fall, literal and figurative, from grace. 

Now that he thought on it, it didn't surprise him. 

He ran his fingers over the edge of a black ribbon decorating a statue. Yes, a token like this would be easier for the old man to give than an ugly truth. Norns knew how difficult it was to part him from those. 

His path took him invisibly deeper into the palace, past the common area and the feasting halls and the library and to the private quarters of the royal family. His feet still remembered these paths, walked them easily and habitually until he was in front of Thor's door. 

He almost turned and sought out his brother, whether out of curiosity or something else he couldn't say. But no, Thor wasn't the sibling he needed to see. 

He did stop, though, in his own rooms, giving over to nostalgia and practicality. The position of the sun, nearly set, told him it would be a while yet before the Allfather retired from his duties for the night, and he needed to remain hidden until then. His quarters would be empty, and if sheltering in them also gave him a chance to revisit the space, then he could call it coincidence. 

His desk was exactly how he had left it. Messy, covered in a disastrous array of paperwork and half-scrawled notes and reference books left open to random pages, half-through a project he no longer remembered. He trailed a finger over the spines of the books on his bookcase, and he would've taken them if they wouldn't simply return to their place at the end of this loop. 

He took in the tapestry on the wall, a garden scene in green and gold done by his mother, and was turning towards the balcony windows when a sound behind him made him freeze. He turned, slowly, to find the figure he'd missed curled up in his blankets on his bed, blue eyes now open wide and staring. 

Of course, trust Thor to be here, where he could be least convenient. 

But while it was odd, he thought he might understand. Grief did things to a person. He couldn't say how long he had spent haunting his mother's quarters in the loop where she'd died, the one where he'd believed in his own escape from the cycle. 

Still, he wanted to ask his brother _Really? After all this time?_

“Loki?” Thor asked, his voice hoarse, disbelieving. Barely more than a whisper. 

“Hush,” he said back. “You're dreaming.” 

Thor seemed to ponder this, and Loki let out a small breath in relief when he apparently accepted it. He didn't move from the bed, only stared. 

“Why—why are you here?” Thor asked him at last. “Why do you haunt my dreams?”

“Who can say why the mind does what it does,” he said, and cursed internally. 

“I miss you,” he said next, and it made him sound small, like the little boy he'd once been. They'd once been, together. 

Loki's throat tightened. “You shouldn't.” 

“I know.” Thor closed his eyes, for a second, before opening them again. “I should have caught you. If I'd have caught you, you wouldn't be gone.” He blinked, but he wasn't really looking at Loki anymore. “I caught the spear, because you had it and I thought you'd hold on, but I was wrong. You let go.” 

Loki couldn't handle this. He stepped back, and something sharpened or cleared in Thor's eyes. And then he was moving, pushing himself off the bed and towards Loki. 

He used a spell that allowed him to fade from sight as he pulled back, and Thor's hand closed on nothing inches away, around the spot where his wrist had been a second earlier. 

Thor looked like he might cry. Loki turned and fled, leaving the room and his brother behind. 

Outside, back in the hall, he took a moment to breathe. He had known, intellectually, that Thor had probably not been lying when he said he'd mourned. But it was one thing to know, and another thing entirely to _see_ it. 

He pushed it out of his mind, and refused to dwell on it. If this plan worked, if he won his freedom from this cycle, then he could decide what to do about his brother. Until then, anything he did would be absolutely meaningless. 

The hour had grown late enough that he made his way into the Allfather's private office. It was empty but unlikely to stay that way for long, so he propped himself up in a corner and cast a glamor of invisibility to hide himself. 

It took minutes for the door to swing open and Odin to push his way in, and he congratulated himself on his timing. The Allfather looked older than he remembered, and tired. The past year had not been kind to him. 

He was still sharp enough, though, to freeze as he entered the room, going stiff and looking straight to where Loki hid. “Show yourself,” he demanded, and his voice was stern, commanding, every ounce the general who had distinguished himself in battle against multiple Realms. 

Loki did as he was told, allowing himself to fade into view with the spear with the Mind Stone pressed to Odin's chest. 

He had expected a fight, a battle of wills that, perhaps, he had no chance of winning. It was almost a disappointment when Odin's eyes simply faded to bright glowing blue, the scepter usurping his mind as easily as it had with the mortals, or with Loki himself in the time before he'd been sent to Midgard. 

He could feel it, the old man's mind, connected to his own and bristling with cool, repressed anger. He held himself as far from it as he could given the connection, and it was like trying desperately not to look at something right in front of his face. 

“Tell me,” Loki said carefully, “about Hela.” 

At the end of the tether, Odin's mind stuttered and jerked. Loki swallowed back the urge to be sick. He sat and folded his hands, picking at his fingernails almost viciously. 

Odin spoke for the better part of several hours, and Loki listened. His speech was rambling, unfocused, but Loki didn't have the will to dive deeper into his mind to direct it. The result was an odd mixture of relevant information and random trivia. Hela had killed the Valkyrie after Odin sent them to stop her from destroying Jotunheim, much as Loki had tried to do with the Bifrost. She'd loved Sleipnir and ridden him for hours in the lower pastures, practicing mounted combat. Her prison was tucked away in a hidden corner of Niflheim, the land of death and mist. She liked plums. 

All the while, he could feel Odin's mind at the edge of his awareness. Somehow, it left him feeling raw and vulnerable, as though it were his memories and not the old man's being rifled through like the contents of an old junk drawer. 

When he could take it no longer he stepped back, pushing away and allowing himself a second to regroup as Odin fell silent. 

He severed their connection through the Mind Stone abruptly, watching as the blue faded from Odin's eyes and into its lighter, correct shade. He almost expected the anger and loathing he saw there, in the way that one expects a disappointment as a precaution, a way to avoid being crushed when it came to pass. Odin raised one hand, and the spell that gathered there radiated power and rage and desperation. For a second, Loki thought he would be disintegrated, and he resigned himself to acting on his newfound knowledge the next time through. 

Until he recognized the spell. A charm, powerful but single-minded, designed to banish a shade back to the beyond from whence it came. So Odin thought him a ghost. It was oddly appropriate; in many ways he may as well have been. He'd certainly dug up enough of Odin's own haunting past, forced him to confront the shadows of not one, but two children he'd cast off. 

He gathered a spell of his own, and let the Tesseract pull him away as the banishing charm released. 

* * *

With the information he'd pulled from Odin, finding the location of Hela's prison wasn't difficult. It also wasn't pleasant. 

If Jotunheim had been chilly, Niflheim was freezing. The sun of that realm was not strong enough to pierce its atmosphere. The eternal night bred frost and fog, and a chill that pierced the thickest of furs. The mist swallowed his witchlights and left him stumbling through the gloom. 

Odin had assured him, at least, that Hela's prison would not deny him entry, nor exit once he'd entered. The spell that held her had been tailored to her magic, designed to ensnare her and forbid her and only her passage. He'd learned, too, how to break it, to unleash her upon the unsuspecting world. 

If all went according to plan, they'd reach an agreement, first. Unleashing her might be a small price to pay if her primary target was Thanos. 

By the time he found the edges of her prison, just a faint offset in the fabric of reality, his fingers had curled into stiff claws and he could barely hear himself think over the chattering of his teeth. He slipped sideways through the invisible crack in reality and relaxed minutely to find the space within a reasonable temperature. It seemed eons of solitary confinement was the only torture Odin would subject his wayward children to. 

He turned, still shivering and with his eyes still adjusting to the light, and found himself face to face with Hela. The way she held her knife, performatively casual, was more intimidating than if she'd been threatening him. 

“Who are you?” she demanded, and he raised his hands slowly, a gesture of surrender. 

“I am Loki,” he said, omitting the ‘Odinson’ half because she hadn't been particularly well disposed towards the idea of younger brothers last time they'd met, and half because he still wasn't particularly enthused about claiming the name. “I've come to bargain.”

“I do not bargain with fools.”

She moved quickly, faster than he could follow, and drove the knife straight through his heart. He had just enough time to look down at the spreading blood and feel a rush of indignant shock before he fell and the world faded and reset. 

“Sir,” Fury said, “Please put down the spear.” 

“She killed me,” he said, still in shock. “No conversation, no warning, just skewered me like a boar.”

It was like the universe was mocking him for thinking this might be easy. 

* * *

The next time, he crept in silently, magic pulled around himself to render him invisible. He held the spear with the Mind Stone close, because as little as he enjoyed using it, and as much as he did not want anything to do with whatever was going on inside of Hela's head, it would be simpler than trying to talk his way around being stabbed. 

Possibly not less painful, though. That was left to be seen. 

He hadn't made it more than a half-dozen steps in before she appeared, either drawn to the entrance by some sign that something had passed through or able to sense his presence. She approached easily, loose-limbed, the confidence of a predator assured that whatever she encountered would be overmatched. 

He held his breath as she drew closer. He would need to drop the spell of invisibility in order to draw on the power of the scepter, and for that, he would need to be quick. When she was almost upon him he leaned forward, extending the point of the scepter toward her chest and readying the spell. 

The scepter tore out of his hands, quicker than thought, and there was a knife in his throat before he could take another breath. He came to himself, gasping and swearing, in the underground SHIELD bunker. 

“Well that was fun,” he muttered, and dropped the scepter into a pocket to start again. 

* * *

“I have a proposal,” he said, brisk and businesslike. After all, there were some predators that only respected a show of bravado, and his previous caution had won him no favors. Perhaps, like the rest of Asgard, she would respond well to a display of courage. 

“And I,” she twirled the knife before driving it home, “have a refusal.”

* * *

“Please don't stab me.” He threw his arms up defensively and flinched back, as non-threatening a picture as he could make himself. 

He tried to follow up the words, make his case, but she had already stabbed him. 

* * *

“I have need of an executioner.”

“You sound like Odin.”

It felt like she drove the sword in a bit more aggressively than normal, and twisted it with a touch more vindictive spite. 

She bared her teeth, and as his sight faded the image of that vicious smile stayed with him.

“I hate Odin,” she said, just in time for him to hear before all faded to black. 

* * *

The next time he dropped down to one knee, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground at her feet. “My queen,” he said, and hoped the words weren't obvious as a lie. He flinched, anticipating the blade, but forced himself to continue. “I have come with a plan to help you reclaim the throne of Asgard.” 

Her sword dropped towards him, and he wanted to shout _Are you serious? What does it take for you to listen?_ but the point landed in the dirt by his knee. Hela leaned on it, studying him with glittering eyes. 

“You have my attention,” she said, and he tried to breathe. 

“An enemy threatens Asgard,” he said. A truth, even if their people did not know it yet. “None of her warriors have the strength to stand against him.” Also true, also misleading. 

“Asgard has grown weak in my absence,” she said, contemptuous. He flinched, and she regarded him with a look similar to that a gardener might give a snail in her prized flowerbed. “I knew this would happen. I warned the old man, but did he listen?” 

She drew up the sword and paced to and fro, ignoring him now. “Of course he didn't,” she growled, and it did nothing for how unhinged she appeared. “Old fool always believed he knew best. God of wisdom, he called himself. More like god of lying, to me and to himself.” She snorted as her attention turned back to him. “Couldn't even spare someone respectable to come fetch me back, I see.” 

“I am a powerful sorcerer,” he said as old resentments curled their way back up to the surface at her tone. She only curled her lip. 

“Are the young men who should be warriors becoming nursemaids and sculley girls as well, these days? Don't answer that. I don't want to know.” 

“And Odin did not send me,” he continued, and that earned him a sharp look. Assessing. 

“So he does not intend to bring me back?” she asked, and though her tone was light, he knew her well enough by now to sense the danger in it. 

“He doesn't know I'm here,” he said, “but as I said, I have a plan.” 

“Go on.” 

“I believe you are powerful enough to defeat the foe that threatens our home,” he said, and he swallowed. 

“Of course I am.” She polished her nails against her shirt, inspecting them with a contemptuously bored air before pulling out a knife and making a show of cleaning underneath them. 

“If you were to defeat him and ride in victorious, none could deny your claim,” he said. 

She flicked the knife at him, and he flinched, but it stopped a hairsbreadth away from his throat, suspended between two of her fingers. She grinned in amusement as she pulled it back slowly. “Why should I worry about who would deny my claim? As if I need prove anything to Asgard.” 

“Yes, true, but Odin—” the knife flicked back at his throat, pressed threateningly against the skin—“Odin is a liar,” he finished carefully, “who would turn the people against you. He's done it once before, after all. You need something even he cannot deny.” 

She didn't withdraw the knife. “What about you?” she asked suddenly. “Why are you here? Why come to me, if Asgard is still against me?” 

He swallowed carefully, but the knife still broke skin. Not enough to put him in danger, only enough to be messy and annoying. “I hold no great love for Odin,” he said, “and I know what it is like to be cast out by Asgard's king.” He let a slow grin spread across his face. “It seems we have that in common, sister.” 

“Ah,” she said, and finally withdrew the knife. “So a cowardly little prince fell out of favor with our father, but you didn't have the spine to try and overthrow him yourself. So now you're hoping that letting me out to do the dirty work will put you back in the good graces of the one in charge, namely, me. Have I got that right?” 

He grinned back, doing his best to look scheming and untrustworthy. It wasn't hard; people tended to read it in even when he didn't make the effort. “Will it work?”

“Probably.” She shrugged, the movement casual, but the sharpness in the look she gave him belied her eagerness to finally be free. “Let's go.” 

He prayed he wasn't making a mistake as he undid the spell and her prison unraveled. 

He wasn't sure where he expected to find himself, but the cliffs of Norway came as a surprise. He'd assumed she showed up there before because of Odin, but it seemed he'd gotten that backwards, and that Odin had sought out the unraveling edge of the prison he'd built in his final moments. 

Whatever had Midgard done, to be stuck with so many of Odin's wayward children? 

“Heimdall will have seen us by now,” she said, looking up at the sky. The breeze blowing in from the sea threw her hair around, giving it a wild, chaotic look that did nothing to make her less intimidating. 

“Well, I did have us shielded from his gaze before you went and said his name,” he grumbled back. She gave him a sharper look, and this time it held genuine interest. “It doesn't matter. We aren't staying here long.” 

He drew forth the Tesseract, grabbed her wrist, and pulled them both to the outer edge of Sanctuary.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait; time kinda got away from me. Anyway, here's a new chapter and I hope you enjoy. ❤️
> 
> Heaps of thanks to the fabulous worstloki, who gives excellent brainstorming help and is also the main reason this isn't a typo-ridden mess!

They stood together on the edge of the asteroid field that served as Thanos' base, lit only by the sharp glow of the Tesseract. “I'll take that, thank you,” she said, eyeing the glowing cube. 

He shrugged and handed it over. 

She took it, tilted it this way and that, and then tossed it back. “Carry it for me,” she commanded, and he let it drop back into the dimensional space he'd stored it in before. “Where are we?” 

“Sanctuary,” he answered, keeping his voice low out of habit and not because they wanted to avoid being found. No, being found was the fastest route to Thanos, and bringing Thanos and Hela together was his best idea at the moment of how to see Thanos dead and this loop finally ended. Still, he felt himself shiver at the texture of the dark and the feel of the stone beneath his boots and the metallic smell of the thin air, so many small details that brought him back to a time he'd rather forget. “Home of Thanos, the Mad Titan.” 

“Ah,” she said, “so that's who I'm killing. I wondered what had you so skittish.” She summoned up a sword and prodded him with it, and for all that it drew blood, it felt more like an expression of annoyance than an attack. “Well, what are we waiting for? I don't want to stand here forever.” 

He shifted his feet, and the rough gravel crunched under his boots. “Is that wise?” he asked. 

She eyed him. “Don't tell me you're scared already?” 

“No.” He shuffled again, another step further away. Above them, a cloud of dust surrounding the field blocked out the stars, leaving the sky void-dark. It itched, to be back here, but he wouldn't call it fear. “I only wonder whether it wouldn't be wise to put together some sort of strategy before rushing in.”

“My stupid brother, strategies are for wars,” she said, tossing her head and letting her hair ripple out behind her. Her grin showed entirely too many teeth. “This is pest control.” 

The distinctive sound of an energy weapon charging snapped his attention out of his own thoughts, but almost as soon as he spotted the man—no one he recognized, probably a low-ranking soldier—Hela had the poor fool by the neck, a knife pressed under his chin and a vice-strong grip pinning his arms. “Unless you want to die slowly and in excruciating pain,” she said, “you will take me to Thanos now.” 

The first part of their journey was silent except for the soft sounds of their boots on damp stone and the muffled whimpering of Hela's captive. When they came to the part of Sanctuary that held people, vague, shadowy forms that sank into the shadows as they passed, they were largely ignored. Thanos may command their loyalty, but it was a loyalty borne of fear, and those tended to break down in the face of other terrifying things. Like Hela, now, half-dragging her captured guard and half prodding him forward with the knife. 

He could feel Thanos' presence viscerally as they grew closer. The Titan had no particular gift for sorcery, but his warped mind projected itself, an aura of will and malice that sent a shiver down his spine. Hela gave him a disappointed look before slicing the guard's throat with a jerk and letting him fall to the floor. 

“That was harsh,” he said, and she rolled her eyes. 

“If I had wanted to listen to whining I'd bring a baby along,” she said. “I didn't need him anymore. Thanos,” she pointed to an outcropping of stone, “is on the other side of that. I could tell by the fear in his eyes whenever he looked this way.” 

He squinted in the direction she had waved a hand, straining to see through the gloom. The stone aheadrahead into several jagged points, and he swallowed. 

He recognized it. The back of a throne, the chair where a madman played king. His mouth went dry, a familiar panic rising up in his throat. “Are you certain a moment to develop some sort of strategy would not be wise?” 

She didn't answer, wasn't listening, because what she was doing was marching straight towards Thanos without an ounce of stealth or self-doubt, and for a second the sheer arrogance of it all reminded him of Thor so hard he wondered how he ever could've doubted the two were related. 

And then he was stumbling after her, following as she stepped into the titan's line of sight and everything went silent. Several members of the Black Order stood on the steps below the throne, and Loki almost tripped over his own feet when he spotted Ebony Maw among them. 

Thanos frowned at the interruption, but didn't stand. “And who are you?” he asked, his voice infuriatingly calm. 

Hela drew herself up, holding a sword lightly in one hand and a dagger in the other, on the surface as relaxed as though she'd merely strolled out onto the training field. “I am Death,” she said, “and I've come for you.” 

“Interesting.” 

The knife that left her hand was a blur, but it froze in midair inches from Thanos' left eye, then turned and shot back in her direction, forcing her to jump back and out of the way. Ebony Maw grinned evilly and twisted his hands, calling forth spiked columns from the stone that sent both Hela and Loki dodging. 

The fight began in earnest. 

Even without the connection to Asgard that had made her nearly unstoppable, even without the Eternal Flame and her army of Asgard's resurrected dead, Hela was a force to be reckoned with. She danced almost effortlessly around the projectiles hurtled by Maw, caught Proxima Midnight's spear on her sword with one hand, and hurled another summoned knife in Thanos' direction with the other as casually as breathing. Loki resisted the urge to teleport away and leave her to her battle. He desperately needed her to succeed, and for all of her disdain, her odds were better with him than alone. 

Against his better judgment, he jumped into the fray. 

Almost immediately, a tremor that shuddered through the stone beneath his feet threw him off balance, and he barely managed to catch Cull Obsidian's mace before it ground his skull into dust. The impact staggered him. He caught himself just in time to throw up a shield overhead when the Maw brought chunks of asteroid raining down from overhead, a deadly stone shower that could have buried him. 

But the second of distraction had cost him, and he turned too slowly to keep Proxima Midnight from hooking the blade of her spear around his throat. He braced himself, waited for the fiery pain and encroaching darkness, but it never came. Instead, Thanos spared a glance in their direction and said, in a deep, cruel voice, “Not yet.” 

Proxima twisted the spear, and a sharp kick to the back of his leg brought him down to his knees. The stone bubbled up to envelop both of his hands, forcing them down, and she stood over him with the spear poised to strike. 

In front of them, Hela ducked, twisted and struck, and Cull Obsidian's head rolled across the stone. 

It was her against Thanos and Maw now, and her next strike struck sparks off the titan's enormous sword. 

Alone, he thought neither would be a match for her. Hela had more strength, more experience, and more strategy than the titan could ever hope to match, but he had strength enough to keep her engaged and occupied and away from Maw. And while Ebony Maw would likely be felled by a single blow, his tricks worked from a distance, dividing her attention and forcing her to dodge projectiles as she fought. 

A chunk of rock clipped her as she used both arms to block a sweep of the enormous sword, and she staggered before regaining her balance. 

The ground beneath her split, and her jump out of the way took a second longer than it should have. When the ground snapped back together, it caught one of her feet between the two collapsing sides. She grimaced in pain as she ripped it out of the stone. Together, they were wearing her down, and Loki could see the inevitable result looming nearer. 

So it was disappointing but not surprising when the next volley of spikes knocked her off her feet and the stone rose up around her, leaving her half-buried on her hands and knees. She pulled and struggled and then went eerily still as the tip of the titan's sword settled into place under her chin. 

“You have spirit,” Thanos said. “Fire. I admire that. We just need to channel it into something more constructive.” 

He leaned down to look Hela in the eyes, and she spit in his face, snarling, still tugging against the Maw's bonds. 

He jerked back, looking almost offended as he ran a hand over his cheek. “You're only making this difficult,” he said. “It won't help you in the long run.”

“I will never bow to you,” she said, her breathing ragged. Thanos smirked. She kept moving, fruitlessly, all unbottled helpless rage. Much as he had been, when he first fell into the Titan's grasp. 

He hadn't thought it possible, after Ragnarok, after everything, but he found himself feeling sympathy for his sister. 

“That's what this one said.” Loki was too tired of it all to even properly feel fear when the Titan's attention turned back to him. “Allow me to show you what happens when you try the edges of my patience.”

_I will make you long for something as sweet as pain._ It seems he would now have the opportunity to experience the fulfillment of that promise. Joy. 

He braced himself for the pain, carefully didn't think about how _long_ they could potentially draw this out, when Hela screamed in defiance and, with a wrenching snap, pulled one hand free of her bonds. The knife that came flying out of her hand was small, and Thanos sidestepped it easily, smirking at it in self-satisfaction as it passed. 

That is, until it hit its mark, sinking to the hilt in Loki's chest. He stared in incomprehension for a few seconds before he understood. 

This was a mercy. Probably not for his sake; he had no illusions of warmth or closeness between him and his estranged sister. But killing him now was an act of spite, a way to rebel against Thanos by denying him Loki's torture. 

He used a suddenly free hand and ripped the knife out, watched the blood as it spilled too fast to be stopped and the darkness as it encroached on his vision. 

“I think it's you who needs the lesson,” Hela snarled as he sank down. “There is nothing you can do to me. Nothing you can threaten that I would not gladly burn to ash myself.” 

Those words echoed in his ears, ringing with an odd sort of warped familiarity as consciousness faded. 

Perhaps, though neither blood nor familiarity connected them, he and his sister actually shared something in common. Once upon a time, that twisted anger could have been his own. 

It was a question worth considering, perhaps, if he ever escaped this accursed cycle. 

* * *

Hela, it seemed, was not the weapon that could take down the Titan, but he could think of no one stronger, none more deadly that he could recruit to his side. Thanos had defeated Thor, defeated the Hulk, Hel, defeated the both of them together along with Heimdall and Loki himself. No person he could think of could muster that sort of power. 

The Grandmaster, perhaps, or the Collector, but they were a hedonist and a coward, respectively, and he'd have a better chance of talking Thanos himself into abandoning his quest than recruiting either of them. 

So, Loki thought, perhaps he needed a more creative solution. Not a person, but a situation that could bring down Thanos and his armies. 

Or perhaps he needed a weapon after all. Or several. As many as he could lay hands upon. 

In the instant after he snapped back to himself, he decided, stepping towards the pedestal that held the Tesseract almost by instinct at this point. 

“Sir, please put down the spear.”

“I need this,” Loki said, and pointed to the Tesseract, “and also all of your nuclear weapons.”

“Excuse me?” Shock seemed to have won out against the man's usual resolve not to answer him until he complied with the shouted demands. 

“You don't need them. You're not even using them. Well,” he gestured to the Tesseract again, “you're using that, but you really shouldn't be. As for the other, last time I checked Earth didn't have a pressing need to blow up anything on that scale.”

“Look, sir, drop your weapon, and let's talk.” Fury raised his hands in an ‘I'm being reasonable, you absolute lunatic’ gesture. 

Loki huffed a sigh. “Director Fury, what is the likelihood that your government will be reasonable and grant me this request?”

“Oh, I'm thinking it's about a zero percent chance.” The mortal soldiers surrounding them shifted with him when he moved, slowly, keeping their weapons raised. 

“A pity,” Loki said. He vanished the Tesseract and then himself. 

He came out on a street, and pondered how best to steal an arsenal of atomic weapons. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's left kudos and comments! I really appreciate the encouragement, especially after the long gap between this and the previous story in this series.
> 
> And of course, thank you again to worstloki for help with ideas and editing!

All told, stealing nuclear weaponry was easier than he should probably be comfortable with given the weapons' impressive destructive capabilities. Then again, the security systems in question were not designed with magic in mind. Much less the magic of the Space Stone, which allowed him to pass through walls unobstructed, or the magic of the Mind Stone, which allowed him to bend the weapons' would-be defenders to his will. 

When he thought about it that way, it seemed less surprising that the mortals' defenses were not equipped to stop the combined magic of two Infinity Stones. He decided that, given those advantages, he could be gracious about the shortcomings in their defenses. 

The mortals he controlled were obliging enough to load the missiles onto trucks and drive them all through Tesseract-generated portals to the large square of green in the city where most of his previous battles had taken place. Truly, any spot would work, but it seemed appropriate. He dismissed the drivers once the trucks arrived, leaving himself the privacy of his own thoughts. 

It was an effort to haul each of the missiles into place, propping them up and pointing them all in the same general direction like a forest of leaning trees. He thought he understood the triggering mechanism well enough to fire them off with seidr when he so chose, but guiding each and every one would take more effort than he cared to spend. 

“Is this, like, a modern art thing?” a passerby asked him after he'd finished angling another, tilting it by brute force and planting it in the grass at his feet. Enough mortals wandered the park that it was only a matter of time before the authorities arrived, most likely, but so far most of them had been more curious than concerned. 

“I am shooting all the world's nuclear missiles into space,” he grunted, hauling the next one up. 

“So a social commentary kinda thing? ‘make peace, not war’ and disarmament and all that?” The mortal nodded, apparently satisfied. “Cool. Those are hella big. Are they actual size?” 

“Indeed,” he said. 

“Are they hollow? They look heavy.” 

“They are.” He stepped back, keeping his hands hovering beside the missile until he was certain it would stay upright and not collapse back to the ground. 

“Hollow, or heavy?”

Loki didn't answer.

“Can I try one?” The mortal nudged the next missile in the line with the toe of his shoe. Loki shrugged and spread his hands in a _do what you will_ gesture. 

The mortal grinned and squatted, clumsily wrapping his hands around the metal. Between the grunt and exaggerated strain as heahe to lift it and the obvious irritation when he finally stepped back without managing to budge the long metal tube, Loki had to hold back an amused smile. 

He waited until the man stepped aside and then hefted it like he had the last, leveraging it up until it sunk into the grassy dirt, wedged at the angle he needed. 

“Dude,” the man said, “you're like, freakishly strong.” 

“Or else you are simply very weak,” he said, moving to the next without looking up. 

The mortal didn't seem to like that, and he stalked off in a huff. Loki smiled to himself; besting a mortal was no feat to be especially proud of, but he'd take his entertainment and victories where they came. 

When the mortal authorities arrived, they came in force. Huge armored vehicles poured out armed and armored men, and helicopters growled noisily overhead. Most of the faces were unfamiliar, but he spotted Director Fury climbing out of one of the closer vehicles. His usual outfit had been modified to include a heavy, block-shaped vest, ruining the aesthetic lines of the long black coat. 

“Back away from the missiles!” he shouted, extra loud to be heard over the choppy hum of the helicopters. Loki laughed. 

“What are you going to do? Discharge your weapons into this forest of weapons that, if detonated, would unleash enough destructive force to flatten this city thousands of times over? That hardly seems wise.” 

The men with their raised weapons shifted uneasily. He was right, and they had to know it.

“We can't let you appropriate weapons of mass destruction, especially on this scale,” Fury said. 

“And neither can you stop me.” He moved to prop up the next missile, and when several of the soldiers moved to grab his arms and drag him back, he continued to work as though they weren't there, hanging off him like barnacles on a ship's hull. It was annoying, and he would have much preferred to simply shake them off, but this made a point. They didn't have the strength to hold him back. Couldn't even slow him down. 

Something sharp pinched his arm, and he looked down to find one of the men holding a needle, broken in half where it had snapped against his skin. “Well that was rude,” he said, and sent that man flying back to roll across the ground a little ways away. 

“Back away from the missile,” Fury said firmly, as though he could enforce the threat implied in his voice, his posture. They both knew he couldn't. Loki snorted, unimpressed, and continued along to the next weapon. 

“Come now,” he said, “you truly can't afford to risk setting one of these off. If they all detonate here, I've no idea how much of your planet will be destroyed, and I doubt you'd enjoy the finding out.” 

“How do I know that isn't exactly what you want?” 

Loki rolled his eyes. “I'm not setting these all up for the fun of it,” he said. “If I wanted to destroy your planet I'd have done it already.” 

He had, technically, several times. That information was unlikely to help his argument, though, so he left it out. 

“And what, exactly, are you doing with those missiles if not threatening us?” 

The other soldiers had fallen back, given him some space, but Loki could see them in the corner of his eye, setting up what looked like small metal canisters. Aerosol poison, perhaps, or a drug meant to incapacitate him so he could be safely removed from the scene. Fury's conversation must be the distraction, then. 

“As I told the young man who was here before you, I am going to shoot them all into space,” he said. “It's a better use for them than you have here.”

Fury raised an eyebrow. His men in the background continued to scurry around, setting things up, or else standing still and glaring at Loki with half-raised weapons. “Disarmament? Seems pretty self-serving for an alien invader. Something makes me doubt you're here campaigning for world peace.”

“Hmm,” Loki said. “not exactly. More that, as I've said, I've found a better use for them. You've enough raw explosive power here to destroy all life on this planet several times over. What are _you_ planning to do with it?” 

“Seems to me like there might be threats from other planets we might need to start worrying about,” Fury said. 

“Precisely.” Loki grinned. “One is headed this way now. I intend to give him a very warm and explosive welcome.”

“Mmm,” Fury said. “Can't let you do that.” 

“As I said before.” Loki clapped his hands, sharp and sudden. The wind that he conjured up sent the soldiers stumbling back, arms flailing comically, and their little canisters of poison tumbling after them. “You can't stop me.”

When he'd cleared a sufficient radius of men and weapons alike, the wind died away suddenly, and he wove an invisible wall of force around the perimeter. Unsophisticated, as far as spells went, but then, he had no one to impress. The barrier only needed to be functional, and even that only for a short time. 

Only a few of the missiles still lay flat on the ground, and Loki moved to prop them up quickly while watching the agitated mortals from the corner of his eye. They ran about and fussed and shouted in a way that was mostly amusing and a little bit sad. If he truly wished them the harm they suspected of him, they'd have little chance. 

There were others, though, that did wish them harm, and the thought killed his amusement. Thanos would not show them mercy for being weak and fragile and entertaining. Had not, many times over. 

With a grunt of effort he propped the last missile into place. 

They stood in crooked lines, tilted like a forest made lopsided by a heavy breeze. Some had colors or symbols or numbers or glyphs painted on the side, testimony to the different governments that had owned and hoarded their destructive power. The shapes and sizes differed, as did the exact specifics of their construction, but they all had one thing in common. 

Their target. 

One of the human soldiers opened fire. The bullets ricocheted off Loki's barrier and, predictably, buried themselves in his fellows; several fell, one with a scream that sounded too much like the victims of one of Thanos' conquests. _Fools_ , Loki thought, but he couldn't quite make it come out disdainful. 

Here in the open sunlight, the Tesseract didn't seem much brighter than a simple crystal reflecting the sunlight might be. It hummed slightly as he drew it forth, but to his eyes it was small and deceptively unremarkable. 

He held it in his hands, closed his eyes, tuned out the clamoring from the other side of the barrier, and ripped open a portal in the sky. 

Yelling turned to screaming turned to panicked shouting. He opened his eyes, lifted them to look up into the portal he had created. 

The Chitauri army hung in the void that showed between the edges of the gaping wound he'd slashed in the sky, huge and imposing as they had been during his first invasion. The larger ships, writhing and half-alive, floated behind row after row of smaller fighters, far enough that at this distance they reminded him of ants pouring from an anthill. 

He'd set it up in advance, a cascade connecting the triggers of each individual weapon, so it only took a spark of magic to set the entire arsenal flying up and towards the army. For a second the exhaust from the launching missiles blinded him, and between it and the roar as they passed he found himself staggering, disoriented. 

His shield fell, but the mortals had seemingly lost interest in him, staring instead at the sky where a wave of missiles and an alien armada rushed towards each other like two opposing waves of soldiers ready to do battle. 

Loki didn't have the power, in of himself, to shield them from the coming explosion. He did, however, have two Infinity Stones at his disposal, and while the Mind Stone could do little to protect them from radioactive fallout, he used the Tesseract to warp and stretch the space between them and the collision, giving the explosion and debris some space to disperse. 

The working barely finished before the two waves met and the world went white, first in a flash of light and then in the afterimage burned into his retinas. No sound echoed through the stretched void he had created, but that almost made it worse. Destruction blossomed across the sky in eerie silence. Ships vaporized into clouds of mushrooming dust, spreading across the sky like smudged paint, or maybe ink in water. 

The mortals had gone silent, in shock or awe or horror. He couldn't even hear his own breathing. He wasn't sure he _was_ breathing. 

And then the flares and explosions died out, leaving them staring at a vast expanse of emptiness and dust. 

He lifted the Tesseract, preparing to banish the working and let the gap in the sky shut like a window. He could feel the dust grow closer as he allowed the spell to fall, the edge of the radioactive cloud drifting down at them and choking the sky with ash. 

The edges of the portal started to pinch inwards, slowly shrinking like the lip of a drawstring bag drawing closed, and he let out a breath in relief a second before he caught sight of something moving on the other side. He squinted, his vision still pulsing with afterimages from the explosion, craning his neck to stare up into the sky. 

Like a cockroach scuttling out of a house on fire, a small ship passed through the cloud of radioactive dust, sailing through an atmosphere thick with spaceship particles that choked the air and dyed the small yellow sun of this planet a bloody orange. It passed through the portal at the last second it would fit, and the fissure drew closed behind it. Loki watched it descend with a quiet, tired sort of horror, because there was no way the one ship to survive the carnage would be his, it was _incredibly, impossibly unlikely_ , and yet he knew, even before it touched down, what would happen. 

The ship reached the ground, sending a tremor through the earth as it landed, and when the door hissed open, lowering into a ramp that led down to the earth, Loki had just enough time to meet the Titan's eyes before his boot touched the dirt and the world twisted and vanished. 

He sighed in the dim light of the underground bunker, too tired even to lash out. After all, there were other weapons in the galaxy, older, more unpredictable and difficult to obtain, but he was not out of options just yet. 

If he was correct, though, the cave where Bor had hidden the Aether could only be accessed during the convergence. Had Thor's mortal not stumbled across it by blind accident, it would have been the perfect place for such an artifact to remain hidden until the end of time. That left him with nearly two years, then, of time to squander until he could make his move, and this time he would not be spending them in Asgard's dungeons. 

He blinked up at the mortals, raising their guns and shrieking their mechanical alerts, and amused himself by keeping his face a mask of neutral politeness. 

“Could one of you, perhaps, suggest a good place to find a drink?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have a longish chapter full of Aether hijinks!
> 
> All my thanks to worstloki, who, in addition to helping with editing, provided many creative suggestions about what Loki could do with two uninterrupted years on Midgard.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

The party was in full swing when a single chime broke Loki's concentration, a soft _ting_ he could barely hear over the music and hum of conversation. So much time had passed since he'd laid the spell, a simple detection charm to alert him of the coming convergence, that he'd nearly ceased to think of it. 

“I'm afraid,” he said to the woman standing beside him, “that I must take my leave.” 

The woman, a production manager named Rebecca, frowned. “You can't be serious,” she said, looking him over with a mix of skepticism and concern. “Liam, this is _your_ party as much as anyone's. You've worked so hard for this.” 

He hummed. “Not all that hard, compared to some of the other goals I've yet to fulfill.” 

“Where are you going?” She grabbed his arm when he turned to leave. “How long will you be gone?” 

“Indefinitely,” he said, and her eyes widened. “A situation has arisen. I'm afraid,” he said with a self-deprecating smile that should have put her at ease, “you'll have to call in the understudent.” 

“The understudy?” She stared at him, her face a mask of blank horror. “Are you serious? What could be so important that you run off and abandon us all on _opening night_?” 

He smiled, at that. At the naive priorities he almost wished he could share. “You've no idea.”

“Your contract,” she said weakly. “If you want to get paid—” 

“I'll have no need of money, where I'm headed,” he said in a low voice. 

If anything, she looked more disturbed than before. “What? You're scaring me.” 

He sighed. There was no time for this; he'd wasted enough already, and if the Convergence was starting he had precious little to spare. 

“Truth be told,” he said, “you probably should be afraid. Though not, I suspect, for the reasons you imagine.” 

“What do you—

He pictured his destination and pulled himself away, vanishing from her sight. 

* * *

His first time dealing with the Aether, no one had told him where it'd been found. Jane Foster had been the one to stumble across it, obviously, but beyond that? Thor gave him no information beyond that directly relevant to fighting Malekith, another testament to the mistrust his brother had for him after his first failed Earth invasion, and they'd had little enough time for talking after. It hadn't exactly been relevant on Sakaar, or during Ragnarok, or in the brief time they had spent on the _Statesman_ before a certain Titan's arrival. After that, he spoke only with a Thor who had not yet lived this time, and therefore one who could tell him nothing about it. 

So he'd kept track of Jane in the two years between the beginning of this cycle and now—nothing horribly invasive, just a bit of information-gathering on the University funding her research and where they'd kept her stationed. It took him to within a close radius of where she must be investigating, and narrowed down the possibilities for the path to the Aether's hiding place from dozens of singularities to merely three. 

The first took him to a dead-end alleyway the humans of this city had piled with rubbish, a dim-lit area with a smell that had him curling his lip as he picked his way around the most offensive litter. A few of the smaller articles were floating, a side effect of the thinning of the space between Realms, but he suspected anyone who ventured back here far enough to see it would necessarily be too drunk to believe their eyes or too unsavory to be believed by their compatriots. 

He turned to pick his way back out towards the next possibility and found himself staring down the barrel of one of the Midgardian's crude projectile guns. The man who held it was definitely unsavory and also visibly drunk, or perhaps otherwise impaired by another of the variety of mind-altering substances mortals were susceptible to. “Your wallet,” he demanded, and Loki fought back a surge of mixed amusement and irritation. 

There was no _time_ , but nevertheless, the mortal waved his gun threateningly. It was possible, should all go right, that he would even remember the lesson. 

He took a deep breath, adopted a tone of breathless excitement, pointed behind him at the alley, and shouted “Look!” 

The mortal looked taken aback, and his eyes flickered behind Loki before he tightened his grip on the gun. “I'm serious,” he warned, but he looked more uneasy than before. 

“ _I'm_ serious,” Loki said in return. He stepped back but also beckoned the man closer, and the disconnect between his actions and whatever his would-be assailant had expected left the man looking baffled. “You should see this,” he insisted, and the man took another hesitant step forward. 

Loki moved to stand beside him, and pointed. “See?” he said as an abandoned bottle slowly rose in the air. The man's eyes went wider, wilder. 

“What the—” 

A sharp shove sent the man pitching forward, and it was the work of a second to rip open the divide between Realms, thin as it was at this point. The man stumbled through the gap and Loki allowed it to pull closed behind him. 

If the thug were lucky, he would find himself on Asgard or Vanaheim or Alfheim, where he would be considered an unwelcome interloper from a realm typically perceived as primitive. 

If he were lucky. Loki doubted any mortal had the disposition for Muspelheim or Jotunheim or Niflheim, and Svartalfheim remained abandoned and dead. 

It took him less time to reach the second possibility, an abandoned building on the outskirts of the city. A white van parked a short ways away made his stomach drop, and he sprinted towards the source of the disturbance's energy. Too late; he drew closer only to nearly collide with Foster, stumbling unsteadily and with the distinctive hum of the Aether already buzzing under her skin. 

He swore, loudly. 

She looked up as though noticing him for the first time, then squinted, then frowned. “Who are you?” 

“The energy you've absorbed,” he said instead of answering, “I need it.” 

She frowned harder. “I don't know what you're—” 

“Jane!” 

Loki barely held back the impulse to swear again. Trust Thor to show up now, when everything was already going wrong. He couldn't have used the Bifrost, either, as that was only repaired with the aid of the Tesseract, and Loki still had that spirited away. Which meant dark energy and a one-way trip he'd still made at the worst possible time. “Heimdall lost sight of you and—Loki?” 

For a second, Thor only stared, his expression clouded with confusion and heartbreak. “You live? How—and on Midgard. How are you here? Have you been here this whole time? Brother, I— _we_ mourned for you, how could you—” Loki could practically see the gears turning, watch as his brother's emotions gradually shifted towards a familiar anger. “What are you doing here with Jane? What have you done to her?” 

“She has absorbed an artifact of great power,” he said. “I need it.” 

He reached for Jane, only to have his brother grab his shoulder and pull him back. “I'll not have you touch her,” Thor said. “Not after your threats on the bridge.” 

_Threats_. Loki had all but forgotten those, buried as they were long in his past before this loop even began, but it was evident Thor had not. 

He made a split-second decision, buried a short dagger in his brother's shoulder, and grabbed hold of Jane. 

He could _feel_ the Aether roiling beneath her skin, could reach out with his magic and all but touch it. Thor screamed, a bellow of anger more than pain, but he blocked it out and reached for the vast energy pooling within Jane. 

He touched it, grabbed hold of it, and then suddenly it was gone, out of his reach. He grasped for it only to find it had pulled away from him, coiling and small, and he realized what that meant a second too late. The power cracked back towards him like a whip, like the uncoiling of a spring, and before he could pull back he was blinking in the blue light of the Tesseract in the underground SHIELD bunker, two years away from a second chance. 

He swore, and took the time to very deliberately walk over and punch the wall before he took the Tesseract and vanished. 

* * *

_Ting_. 

Loki gathered the papers from his desk as he stood. The essays, half-written, detailed different periods of Midgard's history, and he thought they would have been accurate if he'd had the chance to finish them. 

“Finished already?” Professor Nguyen gave him a dubious look as he made his way down the aisle between the desks, crumpled papers in one hand. Loki walked past the woman and dropped the handful in the trash bin by the door. 

“Actually,” he said, “I realized there is somewhere more important I need to be.” 

The wave of shocked titters that swept through the classroom as he left was oddly satisfying. 

He turned a corner and disappeared from sight, pulling his way to London once more, a little ways outside the abandoned building and its magical pathway. He nearly ran into Jane again, but this time he could not feel the power of the Reality Stone pulsing underneath her skin. No, he had caught her before she stumbled into it, and he breathed a sigh of relief. 

“I'm sorry, my lady,” he said, “but I'm afraid you shouldn't be here.” She jumped and twisted to give him a sharp look, half reproachful and half like a child caught sneaking cookies. “If you continue this way you'll find yourself possessed by an ancient artifact of power. Not pleasant, I can assure you.” 

He brushed past her as she stared after him in shock, following the trail of magic that drew him towards the place where two realms touched. 

The pathway hung open, with not even a thin curtain of reality to separate the two worlds. He stepped easily into Svartalfheim, flinching internally when the sight of the dark sand and the feel of the dead air brought back unpleasant memories of his last time here. Flashes of hot, poisoned blood flooding his lungs, of coherence fading as he babbled at Thor, the irrational hope of being understood, _absolved_ burning bright and fuzzily in his addled mind, of waking, mouth and nose and open wound full of gritty black sand, after his brother had left him for dead. 

He pushed them aside. 

All that mattered, at the moment, was the Aether. He could feel it swirling uneasily in its column as he approached, brushing over the crack that would let it seep out of confinement but not approaching him. “Hello,” he said, reaching towards the nebulous power with a wide grin. “I believe it's time the two of us became acquainted.” 

It seemed to pull back a little as he reached for it, reticent. Loki frowned. 

He sent a trickle of his own power in after it, coaxing it slowly towards him. It progressed bare inches at a time, sometimes stopping to retreat a ways before moving forwards once again, and it was all he could do not to huff in frustration. The process felt more like enticing a wild animal closer than any sort of more reasonable progress. It seemed… wary, which made no sense. To the Stone, this would be their first encounter. 

Unless...unless it had a sort of memory, able to transcend even the loops in time created by its sibling Stone. That, if true, might well cause complications. 

Just when he thought it might take something more to draw the Aether forth, it rushed out, surrounding him in a cloud of glowing scarlet power. He laughed, triumphant as it swarmed around him, buzzing uncomfortably against his skin. 

And then it continued on, rushing past him in a sudden breeze. 

He turned to watch as it passed only to find Jane Foster standing behind him, eyes flashing briefly red as the last of the Reality Stone vanished into her flesh. 

“What,” he said through gritted teeth, “are _you_ doing here?” 

She swayed, and blinked, and then her eyes cleared. “What?” 

“Why would you follow me after I _specifically warned you_ about what would happen if you did?” he asked, hearing the edge of hysteria crawling through his voice but unable to banish it. Her expression turned wary, and she took a step back. 

“What you said didn't make any sense,” she said stubbornly. “An artifact of power? It sounds like you're hiding some sort of advanced technology, or else just trying to keep me away from the source of my anomalous readings.” 

“I _was_ trying to keep you away from it, because it is _dangerous_ ,” he all but shouted. “You've doomed yourself. You've likely doomed us all!” 

“I didn't know,” she said, and now she sounded frightened as well as defensive. 

“That's the problem, isn't it? You and the always having to know.” 

“Loki?” Thor again. Loki spun to face him, resisting the urge to strike out, to attack and take his frustration out on a familiar target. “You live?” 

Instead of lashing out, he took hold of Dr Foster and pulled the two of them, together, along the branches of Yggdrasil to a secluded spot a little ways off. It was not far, only far enough to give them a bit of privacy, to keep Thor and his wrath at a distance until he did what he must. 

Jane looked around at their new surroundings and blinked, once, twice. “What—how did you—?” 

He huffed a breathy laugh. “Of course, that's the first question you ask me,” he said, and she turned to frown at him. 

“You said that,” she said, “like you know me, or—

“The energy that possesses you,” he said, “I need it.”

“What?” 

“If left unchecked, it will destroy you,” he said. “I can remove it.” 

“I haven't got any—” 

He took a deep breath, prepared himself, and pressed the palm of his hand to her forehead. 

Last time, he had rushed in after the Aether unprepared and been careless in his haste; he had not taken the time to shield himself from the Stone's effects. His own magic, however formidable, could not guard against the Aether's power, but he had two Infinity Gems already at his disposal. He could not wield them to their full power; unlike the Aether, they did not meld with their wielder, and it would take equipment he did not possess to draw out their full effect. Still, he had enough to hold back the full power of the Aether, to keep it from rushing in and overcoming him as it had the last time he tried this. 

He reached into the scientist with his magic slowly, carefully probing for the power that was not her own. When he found the Aether it was a simple thing to take hold of it and begin to draw it out, using the same care he might with a too-large fish hooked on a weak line. The Stone twisted and pulled against his slow progress, rendering it slower still, but it could not burn him through the barrier of the Tesseract's power. Dr Foster's eyes had gone wide and blank when he started the process, and they remained so now. 

The power drew back as it had before and lashed out against him, once, twice. He flinched at the impact, but his precautionary spell of protection held under the onslaught. He felt himself relaxing as he drew still more of the Aether from its unwilling host, struggling, thrashing, but compelled nonetheless to go where he wished it. 

It drew back again, preparing for a final strike, but he held on. He nearly had the last of it out now, only the most stubborn tendrils still clinging to the woman before him. He braced himself for the impact even as he kept pulling. 

The Aether didn't snap back at him again, though. Instead, it shot upwards, rising until it met the ceiling of the old abandoned building they crouched in. The spot directly above his he'd glowed a fiery crimson for a second, and when the glow faded it left behind a different color than the crumbling plaster. The patch of ceiling had gone grey, the solid, dark grey of heavy stone. 

He realized too late what had happened, and how. The stone that had sent Loki on this series of endless loops was the Time Stone, the one that pulled him through the Void to Earth that he might claim it the Space Stone, the hateful gem set into the scepter given him by Thanos himself the Mind Stone. The Aether, though, was the Reality Stone; it could alter the world around them as easily as its sisters could turn back the clock or warp a man into a mindless thrall.

It has shifted reality sideways, just enough to hang the heavy stone above him, then twisted again. He felt as the power of gravity beneath his feet surged, and didn't have time to finish the curse that escaped his lips before the stone crashed down on him with a force magnified to thousands of times that of its actual weight. 

He opened his eyes to a cool blue glow as he finished the word, then said it several times over for the full effect. 

* * *

“Ah, there's my mysterious nemesis.”

Loki turned to face Stark, disguising his smile by lifting his glass of champagne to his lips. “I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” he said pleasantly. 

Stark's smile broadened, but didn't quite reach his eyes. “Competitor, then,‘” he said, just as pleasantly. He sipped his own drink. “It's only a matter of time before we find whatever spy you've managed to weasel into our ranks.” 

“That should prove difficult, given that I've neither the inclination nor the need to spy on the doings of you and yours,” Loki said. Truthfully, even; travel backwards through time made seeing advancements before they were officially unveiled a simple affair. 

“So how exactly do you expect me to believe that a tiny startup tech company managed to beat Stark Industries to the punch on the last—” he made a show like he was counting in his head, “three? Developments we planned to unveil. “C'mon. It's not even subtle.” 

“You've a saying here about great minds,” Loki said casually, and Stark snorted. 

“ _Truly_ great minds don't need to ‘borrow’ ideas from their rivals.” 

“Mmm,” Loki said, “we're rivals now?”

“We won't be, once I find the leak,” he said confidently. 

“Keep telling yourself that.” He smiled what he knew to be his most irritating smile, and was gratified when Stark scowled at him, his false casual attitude slipping at last. “Ah well, I suppose time will tell.” 

“Oh, don't worry, it will.” 

Loki inclined his head, a polite concession calculated to irritate the man further. “Perhaps. Have you visited the refreshments table yet?” 

Stark frowned even harder at that. “Everything has pomegranates in it, for some reason,” he said irritably. “I'm allergic.” 

“Oh no,” he said, “how terrible, to attempt to give you food that, should you accidentally consume it, would lead to your painful and untimely death. What an inexcusably rude thing for a person to do.” 

Stark gave him an odd look. “Okay, that was weird,” he said, “and besides, I only get, like, a rash.” 

Loki couldn't quite keep the disappointment out of his expression. “Oh,” he said. “Well, then.”

“What did you mean by—”

 _Ting_.

Stark frowned, again. “Was that like an alarm on your phone or something?” 

“I'm afraid I must take my leave,” Loki said, and Stark's eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. 

“You're leaving? Now? What could possibly be more important than—” 

“I'm going to steal an ancient artifact of power that once belonged to genocidal elves,” he said, cutting Stark off to watch the expression of annoyance on his face grow. “I need it that I may defeat a Titan warlord and set the flow of time back on its correct course.”

“Fine, don't tell me, then,” he heard Stark mutter as he turned and walked out, and he smiled to himself as he went. 

Dr Foster hadn't quite reached the abandoned building when he found her, this time; she stood outside, approaching it with all the oblivious curiosity of a cat chasing a string. He crossed the distance to where she stood in quick, easy strides, using just the barest hint of magic to keep himself from being noticed as he walked up behind her. A hand on her shoulder, a tug on the fabric of reality, and then they were standing in a small apartment, comfortably furnished but poorly lit. Dr Foster blinked in surprise, spinning to face him. “My apartment? How am I—who are you?” 

He allowed himself a short laugh. Even now, to be so curious...how very in character. “That is not important. I merely needed you out of the way for a time.” 

Her eyes went wide, and something like fear pierced the stubborn resolve to press for answers in her eyes. 

He didn't give her a chance to ask whatever questions would inevitably come next, only tipped his hand in a short wave and vanished once more. The empty lot with its abandoned building reappeared, the clouds slightly thicker than they had been a minute ago and starting to sprinkle rain like a fine mist. 

A minute, then two passed as he gathered himself, breathing deeply. Two years of playing at Midgardian business had left his magic woefully out of practice, and so many journeys across Yggdrasil's branches would have left him exhausted even were he in perfect condition. Nevertheless, he made the concerted effort to pull himself together and straightened. 

He expected to find the building empty with Dr Foster forcibly removed from the situation, so he nearly fell over from the surprise when a tall, muscular figure nearly collided with him in the doorway. He staggered back but Thor stood stock still, watching him as dawning comprehension lit up his face. 

“Loki,” he said at last, “you live?” 

“Thor,” he said back, “what have you done?” 

Because his brother's skin crackled with more than its usual energy, humming with a power far deeper and older than his own lightning. A hatefully familiar energy, and he thought that perhaps he should have seen this coming. 

“Jane was here,” Thor said, sounding just a touch disoriented. “Heimdall couldn't see her; she vanished from his sight. Was that you? Did you...?” Relief gave way, again, to suspicion. “If I find out you've harmed her, I'll—” 

“She is well,” Loki said, “which is more than I can say for you, you stupid oaf. Are you even aware that you've absorbed an entire _Infinity Stone_?” 

Underneath the gold of his complexion, Thor went a bit pale. “There was a cave,” he said. “I was looking for Jane, and I saw—I don't remember. An _Infinity Stone_? Are you certain?”

Loki took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. If the Aether would not allow itself to be pulled from the mortal scientist, he had little chance of coaxing it from his brother, who, objectively, would make a more fit host. “Perhaps we can use this,” he said instead of shouting or cursing or lashing out at Thor, who blinked at him in stupid confusion. “Can you call on the power of the Aether? Channel it in your lightning?” 

If he could, such a combination of powers might just be enough to kill Thanos. They could worry about how to remove the pernicious thing from Thor once the Titan was dead. 

“I don't know if I—” Thor started, but Loki cut him off. The rain, he noticed with a curious sort of detachment, had all but stopped. 

“Try calling on your lightning,” he said “Infuse it with the power within you.”

Thor looked doubtful, but he took up Mjolnir nonetheless, holding it aloft towards the cloud-covered sky. His fist crackled with sparks and he closed his eyes, and the incandescent white of the tiny arcs shot through with deep crimson flecks. 

Loki watched the energy build with mounting anticipation as the magic gathered, swirling like a vortex through the air as it converged on a single spot, an outlet for its release. 

By the time Loki realized what point it was the power coalesced around, it was too late; the Aether-reinforced lightning hit him with a sharp kick, and the electricity coursed through his body in a single deadly wave. Every muscle tightened at once in a painful, white-hot second before he felt his heart stutter and stop, and he made it through a half-second of collapsing before he was suddenly, jarringly upright, in an underground SHIELD bunker that by now had become a place he associated with helpless failure. 

“Sir, please put down the spear.” 

Loki took himself away, took a deep breath, and held it so long that spots danced in front of his vision. 

* * *

“And you're sure SHIELD sent you?” 

“Absolutely.” 

Captain Rogers' expression was wary, but it was a confused sort of wariness so empty of hostility it was almost refreshing. “And this is what they want me to wear?” 

“I assure you,” he said, using every ounce of his skill in deception to keep his expression earnest and empty of humor, “this uniform is both functional and highly fashionable. Your old stylistic choices were decades out of date.” 

He raised up the uniform, and Loki did not laugh. He didn't even smile. “You don't think it's a little bit...colorful?” 

“That's intentional,” he said simply. “It catches the eye.” 

“And the fur?” 

“That's the detail I'm most particularly fond of,” he said, doing his best impression of the look proud mothers wore when looking down at a new baby. “It'll look quite stunning, I assure you.” At Captain Rogers' continued skeptical look, he added, with an expertly faked touch of hurt, “I've already redesigned the uniforms and tactical clothing of many of SHIELD's foremost assets.” It was technically true, even if his designing spree wasn't exactly condoned by the organization. Part of him wished he'd been there to see the other not-yet-Avengers' faces when they'd seen his modifications. 

Perhaps he'd have time to swing back around and get a picture of Fury's reaction when he saw his coat, at least. 

He turned back to the captain, doing his best to project innocence and hopefulness. “Will you at least try it on?” 

Rogers, in turn, looked a bit like a cornered animal. “I guess it wouldn't hurt to—” 

_Ting_. 

He swore internally. “I apologize,” he said, “but it seems we may have to postpone the fitting to another time.” 

“Yeah, okay,” he said. The profound relief on his face told Loki that it would be difficult to talk the captain into trying it on when he made it back. If he made it back. 

With his track record so far, it didn't seem likely. 

Still, just in case, he waited until he was out of the house and out of sight to cast the spell that would bring him to London. No sense in raising the captain's suspicion if there was any chance, however slight, that he might get the opportunity to see him in the tastefully ludicrous armor once this was over. 

He arrived to find the lot in front of the building where the doorway to Svartalfheim would form empty except for Jane Foster and silent except for both of their footsteps. She didn't notice him, either because of his skill at fading into the shadows or her own obliviousness in the face of a scientific puzzle. 

“Thor won't be here for a few moments more,” he said into the silence, and she startled as she spun to face him. 

“I didn't see you in the—wait, did you say Thor? Thor's coming? How do you know—who are you?” 

“I need you to wait until he arrives to go off and investigate,” he said. “Perhaps we might have a bit of conversation in the meanwhile?” 

“Who are you?” she asked again, equal parts curious and suspicious. “How do you know Thor?” 

“We grew up together,” he said. 

“So you're what, a childhood friend?” 

“Indeed.” A truth and a lie in one, the best form of deception. He raised a finger as she started to speak again, no doubt with another question. “That was one answer; I'd like one in return before I give another.” 

She frowned. “I thought you knew who I was, or else why are you sneaking up on me?” 

“I know who you are, Dr Foster,” he said. “I've a different question. Are you familiar with the concept of a time loop?” 

Her expression was no less wary, but now it took on an air of skepticism as well. “What, like Groundhog Day?” 

The smile that pulled to his lips was almost genuine. “Precisely. So say that, hypothetically, a person was to be stuck in such a time loop. How should they escape?” 

She blinked, then gave him a concerned look. “Are you serious?” 

He shrugged. “Perhaps it was foolish of me to think you might have an answer to the question, but it seemed worth the trouble of asking.” 

“I'm more of a science person, less science fiction. Sorry,” she said, and he frowned. 

“You study the energy left behind after the formation of the universe, yes?” 

“Well, sort of? That's not exactly how I'd describe...” 

“Do you think it is capable of holding a grudge against a specific person? And could this grudge, if it exists, carry through the different iterations of a theoretically existent time loop?” 

“Why are you asking me this?” 

He debated explaining the situation to her, at least inasmuch as he could in the time they had--it was unlikely she'd believe him, but that mattered very little, on the whole—when they were interrupted by the low growl of distant thunder. 

“Loki.” Jane started at Thor's voice and spun around to face him; Loki only rolled his eyes. “Move away from Jane.”

“We're only having a conversation, Thor,” he said, waving a hand. “Come, join us.” 

“Leave her alone,” Thor said again, angry, but also wary enough to make Loki feel a bit insulted. He'd not harmed the lady yet, and if he intended to, speaking to him as though he were an errant and unpredictable wild animal of some sort was hardly going to help. 

“Come over here and make me,” he said, and just like that, Thor stomped over to where they were standing and grabbed Loki by the shoulder as though to physically pull him back and around. 

He was ready for it, though, and he took hold of Dr Foster's wrist a second before. At the contact he unleashed the spell he'd held in reserve and pulled the three of them away. 

The second they hit the ground, he released the both of them and took a step back, raising his arms in a gesture of surrender. Thor scowled, but didn't try to hit him, at least, while Jane just blinked in the sudden sunlight. 

“Is this Puente Antigua?” She took two quick steps forward, as though she wasn't sure what she should rush off and investigate, then stopped and turned to face both of them. “How did we get here?” 

“Why did you bring us here?” Thor demanded, which was probably a better question, albeit a far less interesting one. 

“To keep the both of you out of trouble,” he said. “You'll thank me. At least, you will if we all live long enough.” 

“Loki,” Thor said in a low, warning tone, but he only gave a short wave and took himself back outside the abandoned building they had so recently left behind, empty now of wandering scientists and careless brothers for the Aether to latch on to over him. 

He arrived in time to see the sun finally poke its way through the grey clouds, now that Thor and his influence on the weather was safe at the other end of the world, and to see a short mortal with dark hair stumble out of the building, her skin fairly buzzing with an unmistakable energy. 

“You cannot be serious,” he said out loud as the mortal made her way closer, steadying herself as she walked. He recognized her even if he couldn't place her name—Dr Foster's assistant, there during Thor's banishment and now, apparently, here in the middle of things. 

“Who are you?” she asked. “No, never mind, I'm looking for my boss, have you seen her? She's short—” the woman waved her hand a couple of inches below her own height “—always looks like she's off in her own world, kind of classically pretty in a ‘not really trying’ kind of way? She is not going to _believe_ what I just found.” 

“I can hardly believe it,” he muttered, and she squinted at him more closely. 

“You saw it too?” 

“I have seen enough,” he said, and lifted one hand to let it hover above her forehead. “May I?” 

“Do what, touch my face? I mean, that's kinda weird, but I guess you asked nicely, so...” she shrugged. 

He let his fingertips rest lightly on her forehead, reaching carefully for the now-familiar energy of the Reality Stone. It lurched away, quicker than before, then dropped on his suddenly wavering consciousness like an axe. He startled back to awareness on the underground SHIELD bunker, blinking as the alarms went up and the shouting started. 

“All right,” he said to himself. “It seems that fundamental forces of the universe can and do hold grudges.” 

Still, he believed that in the absence of other alternatives, the Aether's hunger for freedom would win out over whatever petty grievance it had decided to hold against him. He could convince it that it needed him to be free as badly as he needed it to defeat Thanos. 

How painful that conversation might prove remained to be seen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would just like to point out how terrible several of these must have been for Thor in the time between when Loki died and when Thanos made it to Earth and things reset. 
> 
> Like, he goes to Earth because something weird's going on with his girlfriend, sees his dead brother for just long enough for him to die in front of him _again_ , and also he or someone he cares about is infected with the Aether and a few hours later Dark Elves are gonna show up out of nowhere while the whole convergence thing happens.
> 
> Honestly, Thor's just really lucky he's not the one remembering all of this, in my opinion at least.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still here! I'll do my best to post the rest of this in a reasonable amount of time, but if chapters take longer than anticipated I promise I haven't forgotten, I'm just back in school. :)
> 
> Thanks again to the incredible worstloki for editing, ideas and advice!

The shields of Asgard were a true marvel of engineering, and one Loki had always taken a particular interest in. There was a reason that, in one particularly long and painful cycle that Loki chose not to dwell on, Malekith and his dark elves had worked to lower the shields from within before attacking the Golden City. From without they were near-impenetrable, and when raised no enemy could pass through by brute force or subterfuge. 

What made them a marvel, though, was that the shields when raised were not fully impassible; anyone added to the main security database could pass through the shields as easily as through one of Loki's illusions. The royal family, of course, could move freely, and the Einherjar, the palace's trusted guards, were granted the ability to cross over upon their induction into the ranks. In this way, Asgard's finest warriors could fight unencumbered by the shielding while their enemies could not reach their homes or families or supplies or strongholds. 

Loki could not recreate the shields themselves, of course, but he thought it might be possible to create a barrier based on a similar premise, one that would allow him and only him into the building where the Aether could be accessed. Recent events had made it clear that were he to leave any route or passage open, someone would stumble upon it, and the cursed object would choose any host it found, mortal or otherwise, over Loki when given that option. 

It would take a considerable amount of work, and nearly all the time he had before the convergence began, but if it worked it may just prove worthwhile. 

The work itself was slow, and would have been tedious had not problems arisen regularly that required clever solutions. The Loki that began the first cycle likely couldn't have managed it, but he had learned many things in the time since, patience foremost among them. 

The major design hurtles had been worked out and the barrier half-completed when, without warning, Thor appeared in the middle of his workspace, sending dust and errant sparks up in a flurry and startling him out of where he had been intensely concentrating on laying down a small reinforcement spell that would make the barrier, when completed, resistant to lightning. 

They stared at each other in silence for a moment, Loki feeling an emotion absurdly similar to the many times he had been caught in the midst of some mischief in their youth. Thor's expression didn't help matters; he practically vibrated with repressed anger, much like he had when he'd caught Loki in the midst of pulling a particularly vicious trick. 

Loki's mouth caught up to the situation before he did, as was unfortunately often the case, and he heard himself saying “What are you doing here?” 

Which, of course, made Thor angrier. “Me? What am I—Loki, _you're alive_.” 

“Yes,” Loki said, “so sorry to have disappointed you.” 

And that wasn't fair, Loki _knew_ it wasn't fair, but Thor was here, suddenly and senselessly, and he had been so close to finishing. 

Thor's jaw worked; he looked dangerously on the edge of punching something. “We— _I_ mourned for you, and here you are, mocking my grief by hiding away on Midgard? Why would you—” 

“Yes, because if I'm doing it then it _must_ be about you, is that right?” he spat back. 

“Fine,” Thor said, and took a step forward, “fine, if this is not about avoiding me then what are you doing here?” 

Thor's gesture swept over the half-constructed energy barrier, still incomplete and useless and half-anchored to the stone. Explaining that he was building a wall and currently reenforcing it in a way designed to keep Thor, specifically, away from him would do little to help Loki's point, so instead he glared in silence. 

“I see,” Thor said at last, his voice still tight with anger. “Whatever it is you think you're doing here, it stops now. I'm taking you home.” 

Thor took a step forward and he took a matching step back. He held himself back from uselessly arguing that point with a Thor who was clearly in no mood to listen, and instead reached for questions that might help him prevent this encounter from recurring. He dodged Mjolnir as it soared past his legs, on a level to trip him up, and kept moving to keep the distance between them. “How did you find me here?” 

“Heimdall told us where you were hiding,” Thor said, and despite a surge of irritation Loki didn't correct him. He pressed it down and focused on staying out of reach, ducking under Thor's next grab and winding up behind him, then backpedaling. 

“And why, pray tell, did Heimdall turn his gaze to Midgard?” Thor gritted his teeth, but didn't answer. “Ah,” he said, as the answer hit him. “You asked him to help you keep an eye on Dr Foster, am I right?” 

“Leave her out of this,” he all but growled, and the next swipe Loki dodged was particularly vicious. 

“Spying on your mortal girlfriend,” he said, and Thor's face started to turn a satisfying shade of purple. Loki couldn't muster any true animosity in the words, not after seeing their relationship flounder and die off in at least one future, but Thor was easy enough to rile up. “It doesn't sound like you were as consumed by grief at my death as you would have had me believe.” 

Thor's expression twisted oddly at that. “Don't,” he said, and his next lunge he caught hold of Loki's sleeve. A jerk sent him pitching forward and then Thor's fingers were digging into his arms, hard enough to bruise. “I was devastated by your death,” he said earnestly, somewhere between angry and pleading. 

“Not enough to keep you from obsessing over a pretty little scientist,” he said, and Thor looked like he wanted to shake him. 

“I am capable of missing you both,” he said, breathing heavily from exertion or emotion or both. 

“Well, from now on you shall only have to miss one of us,” Loki said in return. “Because unless I'm mistaken, the Bifrost is still disabled, so without me you've no way of returning to Asgard. Which should leave you and Dr Foster plenty of time to become reacquainted.”

In a single movement he wrenched himself free of Thor's grasp, drew forth the Tesseract, and took just a second to savor the look of shock and panic that crossed Thor's face before he allowed the Stone to pull him away. 

He didn't take himself far, only the short jump to a nearby Midgardian city, but Thor had no way of knowing that, separated as he was from Heimdall and his sight. 

The Tesseract still hummed softly in his hands, glowing brightly. “You know,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “of all the Infinity Stones I've seen, and I've seen most of them by now, you are by far my favorite.” 

It flickered in a way that reminded him vaguely of a playful wink, and he turned it over in contemplation. “I've wielded Space and Mind,” he said to himself, “and fought against others wielding Power and Reality. I'm trapped where I am because of Time. As a matter of fact,” he said, “the only Stone I've never encountered is Soul.” 

He held out the Tesseract, letting it feel what he wanted and waiting to see if it would agree. The Stones called to one another, and one with the power of Space could, if it so chose, take him to any of the others. “Bring me to the Soul Stone,” he asked it, half out of curiosity and half because here, in that curiosity, might be another avenue he'd yet to try. 

It paused, considering, and then his surroundings faded away and he stood enshrouded in mist at the top of a high cliff under an alien sky. 

Wind tugged at his cape, whipping it around his legs, and if it weren't for his Jotunn heritage the air would probably have been too cold for comfort. The landscape spread out before him jagged and bleak, and when he swept his eyes over the stone it gave no token that an artifact of power was anywhere nearby. 

He could taste it, though, a crackling in the air like ozone, and that alone convinced him the Tesseract hadn't been mistaken to bring him here. 

“It's been a long time indeed since I've seen the artifact you hold.” 

Loki spun. A figure stood in a billowing black robe, face horrifically skeletal and eyes glittering with avarice and fear as he watched the Tesseract in Loki's hands. He hadn't heard the man approach; either he knew how to keep his footsteps silent or he was floating inches above the stone. The robe made it difficult to tell. 

Loki took a step forward, and the man took a matching step back and hissed. “Don't bring that any closer,” he said. “It is the power that banished me here.” 

“I've found that they are quite capable of holding grudges,” he said, and dropped the Tesseract into a fold of space. The man relaxed, a little. “But servicing a grudge isn't what brings me here.” 

“No,” the man said, “you seek another power.” 

Loki tilted his head. “So you know of it?” 

“I guard it.” Loki sized him up, then; the guardian was a bit ominous, but if it came to a fight Loki suspected he wouldn't be much of a challenge. “Cursed to protect a power I may never possess, and judge those who would wield it.” 

“A test?” 

The guardian didn't answer, only turned and beckoned him to follow. They walked a short ways down a narrow path, Loki following close at the other's heels but aware that the only footsteps to hear were his own. 

They stopped at the edge of a cliff, and the guardian beckoned over it with a bony hand. “It requires a sacrifice,” he said. “One you love. A soul for a Soul.”

He peered over the edge. It seemed unremarkable, a steep drop onto hard stone. “Excuse me?” 

“Power must come at a price,” the man muttered. 

“And the price for this one is a life,” he said. “Someone we love.” 

“To wield the powers of the universe requires conviction.” 

“And to guard them, apparently, requires a stunning lack of sense.” 

The man couldn't frown, exactly, he hadn't enough of a face for it, but the annoyance that crossed his skeletal grimace was nonetheless clear. 

“Conviction alone does not ensure that a person will wield power well,” he said, “or to agreeable ends.” 

“That is true,” the man said, and his voice was more terse than before. “But it also requires they be capable of love, and willing only to seek power in the gravest of circumstances.”

Loki shook his head. “All men feel love,” he said, “even evil ones. I can say that from experience. Feeling love does not set any apart. Choosing to act it out, to actually love...that's what should matter, does matter, and it's the opposite of what you're asking.” He turned back to the edge of the cliff, looking down at the rocks below. “Your condition is foolishness,” he said, “because you say your righteous wielder must love, but to truly love someone is to refuse to sacrifice them to your own petty wants and ambitions.” 

He thought of Thor, screaming under the energy of the Power Stone, ultimatum ringing in his ears. _The Tesseract or his life_.

“The only people who could pass your test must be desperate or evil,” he said. “And those are the worst possible people to entrust with power.” 

The air behind him remained silent. “What,” he said scornfully, “no answer?”

A sharp shove at his back caught him off guard, and he went tumbling over the edge. The world spun then righted suddenly in a flash of orange light, and then he was back in the underground SHIELD bunker, blinking to adjust to the semidarkness. 

“He _pushed_ me.” The mortals were giving him an odd look, but he was beyond caring. 

He grabbed the Tesseract in one hand and it pulled him right away, as though it had shared his thought. Two steps towards the edge of the cliff had the guardian appearing in front of him, manifesting from the shadows like a ghost.

He was quick but Loki was quicker; he grabbed the front of the swirling robe in both fists and lifted the man off the ground.

“I don't know if this will get rid of you permanently,” he said, and a handful more steps took him to the edge of the precipice, “but I'm willing to bet it will hurt.” 

The man was strangely light, as though, like a bird, he had hollow nothingness in his bones; when Loki threw him he practically soared through the air before disappearing below the edge. 

That done, he drew forth the Tesseract once more, pulled himself back to Midgard, and considered his next move. 

* * *

The answer, when he arrived at it, was remarkably simple, for all that it might not prove easy.

Heimdall had seen his project and deduced his presence because his eyes had been turned here, to Midgard, at Thor's request. He suspected it was not a single and longstanding request, either, that kept the Gatekeeper's attention fixed on the small and backwater realm. No, Thor had a tendency to keep at an idea obsessively once he'd had it; he would ask, time and again, after the girl unless he had something else to occupy his attention. 

Loki could likely have come up with another way to distract his brother, given a little time and thought. Something equally as effective and less cruel. 

Loki had never been known for his kindness. 

“Thor,” he said quietly, and it was almost comical the way his brother's head snapped around. Or rather, the projected double he had sent in his place said the word, not that this Thor could tell the two apart. 

Before his brother's eyes could focus on the illusion, he let the double wink out of existence, seen in the corner of the eye and then gone. 

“Loki?” Thor's voice came out wary, uncertain; Loki held his silence. “Brother?” A slight quaver crept in with the word. Grief? Or perhaps fear? Thor had never been particularly afraid of ghosts, but they both knew enough to be wary of spirits who lingered. 

Either way, grief or fear, should be enough to keep his mind here and not wandering down to Earth. 

The next time the illusion was only a voice, behind Thor and quiet enough to leave him doubting if he heard anything at all. “Thor.” 

He spun again at the whisper of his name, eyes darting over the shadows. “Show yourself,” he demanded, with a calm that was so obviously a lie that Loki wanted to laugh. Thor's shoulders were tense as a drawn bowstring, his hands curled into tight fists at his sides. 

Loki let the image fade as he pulled back to himself, leaving Thor alone in his rooms once more. 

For now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I_ didn't include an entire sidebar to have a character I like rant about a part of canon that made me mad, _you_ included an entire sidebar to have a character you like rant about a part of canon that made you mad.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-indulgent chapter is self-indulgent.
> 
> Many thanks to worstloki for proofreading and editing and generally helping to make this story more presentable!

The first few days Loki continued the same way, faint, half-heard whispers and ghostly images that faded the second Thor tried to look directly at them. After the first few times his brother stopped responding, but the tightening of his expression and the dark circles growing under his eyes let Loki know his efforts were not in vain. 

For almost a week, Thor walked around with his eyes firmly fixed forward and his shoulders stiff, with apparently very little on his mind besides avoiding the persistent ghost of his brother. Frigga—and it hurt to see her, alive but subdued after the mess of the last year—regarded this version of Thor, sleep-deprived and on edge, with a pensive frown, but held her silence. Which was well enough; he didn't need her investigating Thor's half-coherent ghost stories in search of their grain of truth. 

She was not alone in her worry. More than one friend asked his brother what was wrong, but he predictably brushed them off, unwilling, apparently, to admit what troubled him. Small wonder; imagined ghosts were hardly a dignified affliction, at least for an Asgardian warrior. 

So everything was going well, or at least according to plan, until at the end of the week when Thor headed, stone-faced, towards the broken-off edge of the bridge where the observatory once was. Where Heimdall now stood, vigilant, watching. 

“Thor,” he whispered, but his brother only set his jaw, striding faster toward the near end of the bridge. 

Even as a projection, he found himself nervous of the edge, and an odd swooping sensation fell in his stomach at the sight of the Void beneath. This was where he had fallen, once upon a time, and even after the years he'd lived out since then, the memory lingered like a fading scar. 

A scar that, for his brother, must still be an open wound. 

As children, they had frequently poked at the bruises the other had gotten during sparring or various assorted misadventures, for no reason other than to hear the other yelp in pain and then glare reproachfully. It had always been done as a bit of fun, brotherly love and pain tied up together in the way those two things tended to be. 

This had none of the levity of their childhood prodding, but Loki could not, would not let Thor reach Heimdall. A second later and an illusory clone hung from the bridge by its fingertips, kicking its legs out over the edge. 

“Help me, please!” it called in a voice only Thor could hear. 

The result was instantaneous. Thor whipped around and his eyes went comically wide, and in an instant he was skidding and sliding towards the edge. Thor hit his knees, hard, and he scrambled for the double's hand in a blind panic. 

Right before he would have made contact, Loki had the double let go of the edge, falling just out of reach of Thor's closing hand. He let it keep falling, growing small with the distance as it spiraled away. 

For a second, Loki thought he would have to actually physically pull Thor back from the edge to keep him from going over, to ruin this charade and risk a restart in order to keep his idiotic brother from flinging himself off into the void after a phantom. 

Instead, though, Thor pulled himself back at the last second, gasping deep breaths too quickly to be calming as he gripped the edge of the bridge with shaking hands. 

“My prince.” Loki startled at the words, but they weren't directed at him. Of course they weren't—he was hidden behind a veil of magic that even Heimdall's all-seeing eyes couldn't pierce, and besides, he doubted the Gatekeeper would greet him as such if he could see him. If he greeted him at all, and didn't attempt to remove his head, again. 

Loki took a cautious step back, distancing himself, but Heimdall only dropped a comforting hand on Thor's shoulder. Comforting, but also solid enough to steady him on the edge of the bridge. “Perhaps this is not the best place for you,” Heimdall said, not unkindly. Thor flinched. 

“I thought...” He said, and trailed off, not telling Heimdall what he thought. Perhaps from embarrassment, or fear of being thought mad. His eyes never left the void, still glazed and haunted. 

“If I may offer advice,” Heimdall said. Thor didn't answer, but he did tear his gaze away from the void to look at the Watchman, and Heimdall continued. “The past may illuminate our path to the future, but it is no place to dwell. No good comes of digging up old ghosts.” 

What little color left in Thor's face drained out. “Ghosts,” he all but whispered. “Have you seen...?” 

Heimdall shook his head. “Most ghosts are just the echoes of bad memories,” he said. He watched Thor carefully, and Loki couldn't quite make out his expression at this distance. 

“And those that aren't?” 

“Are seldom encountered and best avoided,” he said, speaking with a passion that spoke of personal experience and made Loki unspeakably curious. If there was a story...

It came to him in a flash. Hela, goddess of death, commanding an army of the restless dead. She hadn't escaped in this reality, not yet, but Heimdall was old enough to have seen her before her banishment. 

Heimdall started walking towards the base of the bridge, and he shepherded Thor along with him. “Ghosts of memory fade with time,” he said, his voice pitched low and soothing. “Pay them no mind, and they will fade the faster for it.” 

Thor nodded, but Loki didn't miss the last apprehensive look he darted over the edge and into the void. 

He had also managed to make it through the conversation without asking Heimdall about Midgard or his favorite human. The plan was proving successful, however much pain it may be causing Thor. 

Truth be told, after everything, he couldn't quite decide whether to feel remorseful or satisfied when watching Thor fall apart. Watching his brother suffer for suffering's sake wasn't exactly something he wanted, not anymore, but there was something satisfying in his grief, a _yes, see, for all the arguments and disregard in their past, he does care._

But then a harsh voice inside him would whisper _yes, Thor always did seem to care more for you dead than alive_ , and whatever satisfaction he was feeling would sour. 

He trailed after Thor as he wandered, looking dazed, back to the palace, and waited for him to walk down a hall before setting a double slipping around the far corner. Thor froze for a split second then sprinted, dignity abandoned, down to the end of the hall. 

Loki made sure he turned the corner just in time to see the fluttering edge of a green cape disappearing around the next turn. Thor gathered himself and ran, again, boots ringing sharply on polished marble. 

The next time was a flash of movement, nothing more than an impression, ill-defined. 

After the next one Thor slowed, walking purposefully instead of all-out sprinting. 

But he kept following, and following, no matter how brief the glimpses Loki allowed him or how keyed up with frustration he became. Loki almost felt bad for him, doggedly chasing after phantoms, continuing to follow them when any rational man would have abandoned the fruitless chase long ago. 

Sunset had long since passed and the small hours of the night were well underway by the time Loki put an end to their game. The dark circles under Thor's eyes had darkened and the lines of his face sharpened with fatigue, but still he wandered wherever Loki pointed him, following with mingled stubbornness and resignation. 

The last double slipped through the door to Thor's room, worked open with a touch of magic. A dangerous trick, perhaps when so few would be allowed to bypass the safeguards and wards on his door, but then, what conclusions could Thor draw? He thought he was chasing a ghost, or his own imagination, or—he didn't know exactly what Thor thought was happening, but so long as he didn't suspect the truth it hardly mattered. 

Thor followed him through the door, boots dragging on stone, and Loki made sure that when he surveyed the room there was nothing to see. No ghosts, no illusions, only an empty room. 

Thor searched the corners of the room, shoulders slumping in disappointment when he found nothing, and then dropped his head into his hands. He didn't bother looking up as he shuffled forward and fell into bed, curling up without bothering to do anything more than kick off his boots. 

He lay there, eerily still, and it made Loki uncomfortable to watch. He crept out, quietly closing and sealing the door behind him. 

* * *

The days fell into a sort of rhythm. When Thor was otherwise occupied, Loki would work on his barriers, re-building all that had been reset after his last attempt. When he approached the bridge, a ghost-like apparition would distract him, leading him off and whispering and drawing up painful old memories. 

He thought, maybe, that it would get easier with time; that Thor might learn what things to avoid, unconsciously if not directly. In a perfect world, he would spend more and more time in other pursuits, avoiding the presumed ghosts, and less trekking to the bridge, and Loki could eventually leave him alone and focus on his own endeavors. 

But it didn't seem to be working that way. If anything, Thor seemed to be making the trip to the Bifrost _more_ , even if he never seemed to be terribly focused on talking to Heimdall when he made it there. 

He'd never considered Thor the type to wallow, but perhaps he had misjudged. 

Less than a week after he settled on this conclusion, Thor disappeared. 

Loki wasn't keeping track of his brother's every move. He wasn't; he'd set up a perimeter to warn him if Thor wandered too far from the palace, a hair-thin trigger of magic that no one would ever notice if they weren't specifically looking for it, and beyond that he would leave his focus elsewhere. 

But then Thor didn't leave, long enough that it made Loki curious. A quick check showed a distinct lack of Thor on the training grounds, and a check to his room found it empty as well. It was difficult to tell—Thor wasn't exactly the neatest of people during the best of times—but the bed didn't look as though it'd been slept in for the past few nights. 

Curiosity got the better of him. No sign of Thor when he trekked out to the gardens, and no familiar booming laugh in the dining hall, not that Thor had been laughing all that much of late. 

No Thor in the stables with the horses, though that had once been a favorite haunt of them both. 

No Thor in the kitchens, swiping food meant for a banquet or flirting with the apprentice cooks. 

A sudden, sinking feeling of dread settled low in his stomach, and he all but sprinted for the healing rooms. He remembered at the last minute to hide himself so that the healers wouldn't have to endure the frightening ordeal of having a long-thought-dead prince crashing through their domain, and he searched the beds one by one, dreading what he might find. 

Nothing. No sign of Thor, or that he had even ever been here. If that didn't leave him still concerned, he'd have felt foolish. 

He was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with his spell, or Thor had managed to slip past it somehow, when he stumbled across his brother almost by accident in the last place he'd ever have thought to look. 

What was Thor doing in the _library_? 

Loki crept forward. Up close, Thor looked terrible, like he'd gotten little sleep and less satisfaction from whatever project was heaped and piled and scattered around him. Propped-open books and scattered pages of notes, some of them crumpled or torn, littered the table and the floor. Thor had his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, and looked like he was half ready to scream and the other half on the verge of falling asleep where he sat. 

Loki edged quietly closer, leaning forward to make out the writing on the desk. He could just make out one of the pages, a collection of runes of a type he'd never seen Thor use, or try to. He scanned the page, trying to make out their purpose. 

When it hit him, his blood ran cold. 

“What the _Hel_ do you think you're doing?” 

Loki hadn't realized he'd spoken the thought aloud until Thor jerked upright, looking suddenly awake. His eyes fixed on Loki, and the expression on his face was half pleading and half guilty. 

The guilt, at least, showed that he might have some sense, even if he'd clearly not been exercising it. The spells laid out—summoning shades was a delicate and dangerous proposition even for a skilled sorcerer. Loki himself would not have dared. For someone with absolutely no knowledge to try it—there was no telling what he could attract, what Horrors he might have drawn to himself in the attempt. 

And that's assuming the entire thing didn't go so catastrophically wrong that Thor simply destroyed himself, and probably a good chunk of the palace along with him. 

“What were you thinking?” he continued, and Thor flinched from the harshness in his tone. “This is by far the most foolish thing you've ever done, and for you that's quite an accomplishment!” 

Loki reached out and swept a pile of papers off the desk, scattering them across the floor. 

“Brother,” Thor said, and his voice sounded harsh, like he'd not had cause to use it in days. 

“Well? A spell for summoning the dead—have you a death wish?” 

Thor flinched. “That's a Hel of a thing for you to say to me,” he said, and the anger simmering in those words sent Loki stumbling a step back. 

“This is foolishness,” he said. “Worse than foolishness. It's practically suicide.” 

“You should know.” 

Loki jerked back, narrowly missing catching the edge of a bookshelf with his elbow. It sobered him; Thor still supposedly thought him a ghost, and running into things would bring up uncomfortable questions. “I don't have to listen to this,” he said, a little relieved how quietly and calmly it came out. 

Thor...blanched. “No,” he said, “no, I didn't mean...please stay. Please, I just wanted to talk.” He sounded so desperate that Loki's heart twisted. “You've haunted me long enough,” he said, “at least grant me that much.”

To his mortification, Thor had started crying, tears running down his cheeks and putting just a hint of a wobble in his voice.

“Fine,” he said, “fine, what is it you wanted to talk about so badly that you'd risk pulling in every unkind and wandering spirit on the realm and setting them loose on yourself to do it?”

“I want to know why.” Thor sounded utterly miserable. A small part of Loki delighted in that, while another wanted to reveal himself now if only to take that defeated expression off of Thor's face. He pushed both feelings down. “Why do you haunt me, Loki? Why can't you find your peace?”

“Why do you think?” he asked, because deflecting was easier than answering. 

“Is it because I destroyed the bridge?” Red-rimmed eyes came up to meet his, searching. “Brother, I had no choice. I could not allow--to wipe out an entire _Realm_ , it was not right.” 

“We always have choices,” he said. Thor looked as though he'd been punched in the gut. 

But was it true, now, in his present situation? Every choice he made led to the same end, every decision undone when the fabric of time looped back upon itself. Could he be said to have made a decision when every decision was in turn unmade? 

“Like when you chose to let go?” Thor asked, but it wasn't the smug rejoinder it might have been had Loki been the one speaking. “That is what happened, isn't it. I wanted to think you slipped, that maybe it was a mistake, but...” 

“That isn't how I remember it,” he said. Honestly, even, although he didn't mention that his memories of that day were muddled, clouded by a haze he'd eventually worked out was probably a result of the Mind Stone's influence. Still, his purpose here was to twist a knife, and Loki did nothing by halves. “I remember being tossed into the Void, shoved off into oblivion like so much unwanted refuse. I remember your smile as I fell,” he added, because the memory still haunted him for all he knew it to be false, “satisfied, like you'd decided it was all for the best. Like you were delighted to be rid of me.” 

“Brother—” Thor choked and then gasped, and when he regained his voice he was nearly shouting. “You can't think—how could you believe that I'd—never,” he said, the words so frantic they stumbled over each other. “I would never do anything like that, never _want_ to. I'd have done _anything to_ keep you from falling, you have to believe me. I never smiled, that never happened, I screamed myself _hoarse_ when you fell, I can't—”

His voice dropped off and Loki glanced around, watching for anyone else who might be nearby to hear the outburst. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be anyone nearby, and sound-dampening spells built into the walls of the bookcases should keep sound from traveling too far, but every nerve in his body still tensed in alertness. 

He almost missed it when Thor grabbed for him, reaching out as though to grab hold of his shoulders. He stepped back just in time. 

“Do you believe me?” The dark circles made Thor's eyes look wild, desperate. “Please, brother, you have to believe me.” 

Loki swallowed past a sudden knot in his throat. “I believe you,” he said, despite himself. “I believe you.” 

Thor didn't look comforted. He kept crying, ugly hitching sobs that tugged at Loki's frayed emotions. He found himself staring, helpless; he would like to leave, probably _should_ leave, and yet it was as though he were rooted to the spot. 

After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, Thor took a deep, shuddering breath, collecting himself. “Where did we go wrong?” He looked at Loki like he was pleading for answers. “You would believe that I tried to kill you, that I would murder my own brother in cold blood and enjoy it. And before that, you tried to kill me, with the Destroyer.” 

Loki viciously quashed the surge of unidentifiable emotion that rose up in his chest. “Does it matter what happened?” he said instead. “It is done with.” 

Thor's face fell. “I suppose not.” He looked off, his eyes fixed, unseeing, on some point in the distance. “I was angry, after you fell,” he said quietly. “With you, for what you did, but mostly for letting go so we never had the chance to work it out. With myself, for not knowing how to stop you, for not catching you when I had the chance.” He looked dangerously close to crying again. “I think I might still be angry, honestly, but now more than anything I just wish things had turned out differently.” He turned, then, and looked Loki straight in the eyes. “Do you know what I mean? What it is to be desperate for a second chance?” 

Loki couldn't help it. The sound that burst out of his throat was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and then he just kept laughing, a thick, bubbling laugh that stuck in his throat. 

Because he had, he _had_ , and look where it'd got him. He'd do almost anything now to escape all the second chances he'd been given. 

Thor looked hurt, again, so he pulled in enough breath to say “Believe me, Thor, when I say second chances aren't always all you hope for.”

When Thor turned back to look at him, the look in his eyes was immeasurably tired. “It's not as though things could turn out worse,” he said, and the naivete of that statement was almost physically painful. 

“If you believe that,” he said at last, “then your imagination must be terribly deficient.” He refused to meet Thor's eyes, letting his gaze drift everywhere and nowhere instead of seeing the still-devastated look on his brother's face. “Believe me, Thor, there are many ways in which things could and possibly will be much, much worse.” 

* * *

He left Thor asleep, passed out on top of the table and his research both, with the help of a mild spell that tugged at his exhaustion and made it harder to resist. When he woke, chances were good he would dismiss the entire conversation as a dream, but that didn't mean he wouldn't think it real. Ghosts were known to reach out in dreams, after all.

Hopefully it meant he'd abandon his foolish project, but just in case Loki had taken a few carefully-chosen pages of notes with him. Better to be safe than leave Thor the option to do something foolish and rash.

He'd little time left to try it, in any case. The wall was nearly complete, and the Convergence nearly upon them. 

And, indeed, Thor seemed uninclined to try causing any further problems. Didn't seem inclined to do much more than mope, the few times Loki checked in on him. Progress on the wall sped up without the need to check in on or distract him so often, and the convergence was only beginning when he finally slotted the last web of spells into place and allowed the entire array to burst into wild, glowing life.

The magic lit the place up like a beacon, especially compared to the drabness of Midgard's aura, making it impossible for anyone with a sense for magic to miss. It swirled and crossed in intricate patterns like figures in a complex dance. Heimdall couldn't help but notice him now, but far too late to do any good. 

Loki stepped through the shield, propped himself up against a wall, and waited. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always, to the incredible worstloki for help with editing this and getting it ready to post! And thank you as well to the incredible people leaving kind feedback; it's so great to hear that people are having fun reading this. ❤️ 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

The first person to stumble into his shield was not the one he expected. 

Dr Foster didn't so much find the barrier as literally run into it. A hand extended in front of her, clutching some sort of obscure instrument, saved her from smashing her face into the unyielding wall of force, but she still bounced back and blinked up at the faint golden outline in confusion. An instant later she was waving the instrument along its edges, somehow frowning in concentration and looking delighted at the same time. 

Watching her explore its edges proved entertaining enough that Loki almost didn't notice the coil of dark energy that deposited Thor behind her. Probably wouldn't have, if threads of lightning weren't crackling along his skin and snapping off into agitated sparks, bright and sharp. 

His eyes raked along the Midgardian landscape until they landed on Loki, who grinned and sauntered to the edge of the barrier. 

He almost flinched back again when Thor threw himself forward, in fury or desperation or another emotion more difficult to name, only to bounce off of the barrier inches from his brother. The rebound threw Thor to the ground, hard, and he staggered back upright without bothering to fix his disheveled clothes or hair and pounded a fist against the unyielding wall. 

“Loki,” Thor said after a moment of ineffectually pounding at the barrier, breathing heavily and so, so angry he could barely speak, “what is this?” 

“Did you know,” Loki said, running thoughtful fingers through the half-substantial barrier that separated them, “that Midgardian children are so fragile that many of the fixtures of an ordinary home are a hazard to them? They have these—” he waved a hand, low to the ground, “little gates to keep them from recklessly throwing themselves down stairs or into ovens and such. For all of its technical sophistication, this,” he gestured to the wall, “serves much the same purpose.” 

“Did he just compare us to toddlers trapped behind a baby gate?” Dr Foster sounded faintly insulted. 

“Loki.” Thor resumed his barrage of ineffective blows, face twisting in frustration. “Let me in.” 

“Well, that would just about defeat the entire purpose, wouldn't it?” 

“ _Purpose_?” Thor hit the barrier hard enough that he shot back a few yards in the rebound, and still it held. “What _purpose_ could possibly be served by all of this? This is not purpose, it is _madness_!”

“So good of you to tell me, again, that I am mad,” Loki said, “but I'm afraid I haven't the time to listen to the whole tirade. I've things to do, and in any case I've heard it before.” 

More times, now, than he could properly count. 

Loki left. Thor continued shouting, but his threats and pleas and whatever else he bellowed faded to unintelligability with the distance. 

It cut abruptly to silence when he passed through the portal into Svartalfheim. The air went still as he crossed over, heavy and stagnant after spending centuries sealed off in the small cavern. Breathing it left his throat feeling dry and gritty. 

He crept forward, footsteps echoing in the silence, up to where the Aether was trapped. It hovered beside the cracked column that must once have contained it and flinched back from his approach. 

“It's only you and me now,” he said in a low voice, feeling the words reverberate through the silence. “No one else is coming.”

It lashed back, folding on itself and swirling, but made no move to approach, either to attack or surrender. 

“Come now,” he said, and reached out with a tentative touch of magic. “There's no sense in being stubborn. Your choices are to join with me or remain trapped, until the next Convergence or longer. No fate I offer can be worse than an eternity of isolation.” 

He didn't know if it could understand his words, or if it would choose to listen if it could, but a tendril of power reached out for the magic he extended. A faint brush, like a soft touch, and it retreated. 

“There,” he soothed, “come closer. You've nothing to lose and all to gain. I know you're lurking here desperate for a host; there's one right here for the taking.” 

He reached again, slowly, and this time he extended his hand as well, stretching his fingers towards the shifting plasma. It eased towards him, and soon his hand was coated in a faint aura of red mist. 

The mist flowed slowly, creeping by inches over his arm as though it were a skittish animal scouting out new territory. Other tendrils reached out hopefully behind him; he watched them probe and then draw back, disappointed. 

“It is only me,” he said again. “None other will come. None other can.” 

The Aether continued creeping, another inch and then another, until suddenly it rushed forward like water out of a burst dam, rushing into his nose and throat and chest. He coughed, sputtered. The sensation as the Reality Stone entered was a bit like drowning and a bit like burning, and the sting in his throat from the Svartalfheim dust was swallowed into the fiery chill that ran through him. He gasped and sputtered, choking for breath and wondering if it hadn't decided to kill him again after all. 

Then the feeling of drowning cleared and he could pull in deep, aching breaths still battling a knot in his throat and a tight, fist-like squeezing in his chest. It felt like he'd swallowed an octopus whole and it'd wrapped itself around his insides, squeezing. The world swirled for a second, black speckles dancing at the edge of his vision and when he came back he was bent double in the dirt, panting. 

The Aether squeezed once more and settled. 

Loki straightened. He didn't feel...comfortable, not exactly, but the pain had passed. He bit off a surge of apprehension and forced himself to reach for his magic. It came, green light dancing through the cave and casting shifting shadows on the walls. 

He steeled himself further and reached for the Aether. Claiming it was the first step in this plan and it'd taken him long enough, but it would do little good if the power of the Stone refused to answer his call. He needed not only to have it, but to use it against Thanos, to harness its power in engineering his downfall. 

He expected nothing, or perhaps pain, but apparently after registering its protest the Aether had indeed accepted him as its host. The power brimmed to the surface at his command, shifting like quicksilver as he held it but part of a reservoir so vast that brushing against it left him feeling giddy. Laughter bubbled up inside him unprovoked and he let it go, let it ring from the close stone walls and through the clammy dead air. 

He ripped the portal he'd used to cross over back open, and when he stepped through to Earth he was still laughing. 

A sound cut off in the distance—so Thor had kept up his tirade all the while Loki was gone. Loki laughed again, the sound half-mad, and moved toward where he'd left his brother. 

“Loki?” Thor asked, and then repeated, “Loki,”when he caught sight of him, the uncertainty in his voice giving way again to anger. “What are you doing in there? Let me in, I swear to you I'll listen if you only drop this Norns-cursed wall.” 

He had one hand braced against the barrier and had lifted the other to pound against it, still, as if he hadn't already exhausted the option of forcing his way in via brute strength. Loki waited, timing the seconds, and then simply wished the barrier out of existence. 

The Aether rose to his call, obliterating the wall from reality as easily as Loki himself might dismiss an illusion. Thor lurched forward, stumbling and nearly falling at its sudden disappearance. A rush of power and satisfaction coursed through his veins like adrenaline, and just as intoxicating. “You were saying?” he asked, keeping the words falsely sweet. 

Thor glared. “That was uncalled for,” he said, and whether he meant dropping the wall or putting it up in the first place was unclear. 

“You asked me to let you in,” he said reasonably. “And I believe you promised to listen.” 

Thor frowned harder. “Then explain,” he said. “What were you doing in there?” He grabbed for Loki, and Loki simply wished not to be there. He wasn't, quick as thought, Thor reaching for nothing and Loki grinning maniacally behind him. 

He laughed, and the sound came out giddy. Almost a giggle, if he could be said to make a sound so lacking in dignity. Thor spun. “I've absorbed an Infinity Stone,” he said and took pleasure in the way that Thor's eyes widened. “Added its power to my own.”

“That is madness,” Thor said, but it didn't sound as accusatory as it had on the Bridge. If anything, he sounded sick. 

“I've been accused of as much before,” he said calmly. 

Thor's face twisted. “But _why_ , Loki? Why do this? Why pretend to be dead, why lock me out, why risk yourself in a needless grab for power? What use do you imagine for the power of an Infinity Stone?” 

“Ah,” he said, “so that's what has you worried. You're afraid I'll use this power to go after Midgard. Conquer it, perhaps, or perhaps simply destroy it. Leave it dead as Svartalfheim.” 

Loki stopped in his tracks, and Thor went pale. What if he did? Thanos would have no reason to visit a barren realm, no motive to conquer it, and wasn't it his successful invasion that triggered their reset to the start? If he were to destroy it first...it wasn't a tasteful solution by any stretch, but it technically could work. This could be _over_. He could be _f_ _ree_. 

“You wouldn't,” Thor said, but he didn't sound like he believed himself. 

The Reality Stone churned beneath his ribs, its power restless and at his disposal. All he had to do was think it, wish it, fully form the thought. 

For an agonizing second, he considered it. 

Then, like a held breath, he let it go. 

Probably for the best. The sorceress who created this mess had likely kept the condition broad enough to include the destruction of the planet at Loki's own hand; he had, after all, been working for Thanos when they met. Like as not he would accomplish nothing other than resetting the loop to the beginning and landing himself back at the center of the Tafl board, so to speak. 

In any case, the thought of adopting a strategy so similar to what Thanos himself might do...it drew a sharp, nauseating revulsion from somewhere down deep in his gut. He'd been prepared to shoulder the destruction of a planet once before, if the frozen rock on which Jotunheim were built could fairly be called a planet, but then he had at least the pretenses of enmity and war to shield himself from full responsibility for the act. Here, his conscience didn't even have those excuses, thin as though they might have been. 

He may yet be a monster, but there were still acts too vile for him to commit, and the calculated extermination of a people under Asgard's protection, during a time of peace, was, it seemed, a step too far. 

“No,” he said at last, “I wouldn't.” 

Thor let out a deep breath, looking relieved enough that Loki must have been truly convincing. “Why, then?” he asked. 

Loki thought about that a moment. “When I fell into the void,” he said, and Thor flinched. “It was not empty. I encountered many things, there, and none of them good. I need the power I now hold in order to face that which must not be allowed to continue.” 

“I don't understand,” Thor said.

“I don't expect you to.” 

He pulled forth the Tesseract, and the Aether curled rebelliously inside him as the songs of each Stone blended into dissonance inside his head. He lifted it, thought _take me to Thanos_ , and let the power of the Space Stone pull him away. 

He didn't look at Thor, didn't watch his reaction. Didn't want to know how he felt about his departure, for all that he could guess.

The stone throne looked as much as it ever had, tall and jagged and ominous and ugly. Thanos didn't stand as he approached, barely bothered to straighten. It seemed he did not see Loki as a threat enough to be worthy of a reaction. 

He dissolved the throne to a pile of dust, dropping the titan on his backside. Even Thanos couldn't make such a fall look dignified. Under other circumstances, it might have been amusing. As it was, Loki had little desire to draw this out. 

The power of the Aether reached out, driven by his intent to destroy Thanos, to unmake him, to tear him apart, and—stopped.

Not like running face-first into a wall—nothing so dramatic. More like riding a horse as it shies away from a hurdle, prodding at a more powerful force that resisted his direction. The power that hit Thanos was barely enough to send him rolling through the dust before his head snapped up and he staggered to his feet. 

A member of the Black Order lunged at him from somewhere on the sidelines. He didn't bother to look and see which; a thought and a tug and they collapsed into gravel. The half-second of distraction cost him, though, and Thanos advanced. A panicked step back took him out of range, but Thanos kept coming, eyeing him thoughtfully now.

“You have another one of the Stones,” he said, voice strangely calm even as Loki set the ground beneath him dissolving. The titan dodged, moving close enough that Loki either had to stop destroying the rock under his feet or risk falling into the Void himself. “You brought it here. To me.”

Rationally, he could probably have caught himself. He had the power of the Tesseract in his pocket and the Aether writhing under his skin; he would not fall indefinitely as he had before.

But the thought still made him stutter, and his hesitation gave Thanos enough time to grab him. The large hand wrapping around his shoulder made him feel absurdly small. 

He lashed out on instinct, not with the Aether but with his own magic, a bolt of fire that should have sent the titan staggering back and over the edge into the blank nothingness of space. Would have, if it had hit. 

Instead, it evaporated before it hit, flames fluttering to the ground in a rain of delicate green leaves. 

Loki's stomach lurched. He could feel it now, the Aether twisting discontentedly inside him, and when he reached for it the power slithered away like it was a snake he'd attempted to snatch out of the grass. 

Disconcertingly close, Thanos' mask of grim concentration cracked into a mad smile. His fingers tightened, and Loki nearly buckled under the pressure. 

“Reality,” Thanos said, his voice heavy with satisfaction. “I had no idea where this one might be. Nothing out there to find but half-forgotten legends, but here you are. Bringing it right to my doorstep.”

Panic flooded through his system and he attempted to jerk back, get away, but the Aether rooted him in place. The humming beneath his skin felt almost spiteful. 

Thanos' eyes closed, and with a spasm that made his ribs ache as though he'd been violently sick, the Aether left him. It swirled around Thanos' free hand, crystalizing and then dropping innocently into his palm. 

A large purple hand closed into a fist and then started to glow. There was pain, a cold so intense it burned, and a smell like superheated metal that, for an instant, brought back incongruous memories of misadventures in Nidavellir, of sneaking around and between the dwarven forges, of the pain that had followed. 

Then he was standing in the light of a different stone once more, and the glow of the Tesseract on the walls of the bunker was a welcome relief. 

He knew without deliberating that he would not attempt to claim the Aether again. It had betrayed him, and whether it did so out of personal spite or obedience to a stronger will or simply some innate nature of reality that made it crave destruction mattered not. The Stone would not work with him to kill Thanos, and as that had become his foremost and only goal, that left it useless to him. 

Raw power, it seemed, would not be enough to see him through to Thanos' destruction. Perhaps, then, an attempt at a more creative solution was in order. A new plan started to sketch itself out, a few preparations, a couple of things to collect. That done, it shouldn't be hard to find his way to Sakaar. 

After all, he may not know the way, but according to those he'd met there, it involved being lost.

If that were the truth, from the way he was feeling he must already be halfway there.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this updated; I've been back in school and it's been keeping me busy! Thanks, as always, to the incredible worstloki for the help with editing and getting this ready to go.

“Get lost.”

He extended a hand, slowly. “I come bearing a gift.” 

The wine had been made in Alfheim, a rare and treasured vintage; Loki had taken great delight in stealing it himself from the Allfather's personal stores. He held it out, and the Valkyrie looked from him and back to the wine warily before shrugging and taking it from him. He barely suppressed a flinch when she popped it open and took a long draught, worth more than some of the lesser items in Odin's Vault, directly from the bottle. 

“If you think this means I'll do you a favor,” she said when she finally tipped the bottle back upright, “you're wrong.” 

“I don't want a favor,” he assured her. “Just enough of your time to field a proposal.” 

She took another long drink from the bottle, then sighed. A few of the bar's other patrons threw her quick glances, but for the most part they were ignored; privacy wasn't exactly a valued commodity on this planet, but the value of minding one's own business was well-understood. 

“If you'd brought me anything else I'd tell you to get lost,” she said at last, and hefted the bottle. “But this is fantastic booze and I'm feeling generous, so you've got thirty seconds to convince me before I throw you out on your ass.” 

“Perfect,” he said, and she wagged her finger back and forth. _Clock is ticking_. “I'm being followed by a formidable enemy. You are in the business of selling formidable people to the Grandmaster to serve as his champions. It seems to me we could benefit from a one-time show of cooperation, yes?” 

She glared at him, or through him, searching for a catch. He held her stare confidently because, for once in his life, there was none. He wanted exactly what he'd said. 

“You're Asgardian,” she said at last. “Rich and spoiled, too, if I've read you right, and I have. Don't bother arguing. If your clothes didn't scream nobility I could read it in the way you stand and your dumb pretentious accent. So why come to me? Why not go whine to Odin or whoever's in charge these days?” She lowered her voice. “You want half the units, have I got it right?” 

“I promise I'm not after your paycheck,” he said, but she only looked more suspicious. “I lure my enemy here, you capture and sell him. That's the entire deal. I want nothing more from you than that.” 

She leaned back, narrowed her eyes. “No.” 

“No?” 

“Not unless you tell me why.”

He met her eyes and considered the angles, the various versions of the truth and which held the highest likelihood of convincing her. “It is a personal grudge,” he said at last. “He has caused me a fair amount of suffering, and I am petty enough to want to repay him in kind. He's a terrible person, though, a murderer and worse, if that soothes your conscience.”

She snorted. “My conscience and I parted ways a long time ago,” she said, sounding a touch more wistful than she probably meant to. She hefted the bottle. “Drowned it in this, probably. A conscience is a dangerous thing to have on Sakaar.” 

“So then you'll do it?” 

She considered another moment, then nodded. “What the Hel. Why not?” 

* * *

The ambush took little time to plan, and less to set up.

He returned to Sanctuary like a fox strolling into a hound's kennel, imitating a casual bravado he didn't feel. “I have it,” he said, raising the Tesseract slightly where he gripped it in both hands, and Thanos raised an eyebrow. 

He also raised a hand to hold back Proxima Midnight, waving at her to stand down before she could stalk over and impale him where he stood, which he took as a good sign. 

“When you didn't return or open a path for our armies, I assumed you had betrayed me,” Thanos said levelly. “Now you return and act as though nothing has changed. What of the plan to subjugate Terra?” 

“I objected to that plan, if you remember.” It was a struggle, keeping his voice level with his heart pounding in his throat. His grip tightened, and the sharp edges of the Tesseract bit into his palms. 

“And I overruled your objections,” Thanos said. _Painfully_ , the hint of a smirk that crossed his face added. “Did you think you knew better than I how to realize the fulfillment of my own plans?” 

“Quite frankly? Yes,” he said, and Thanos' expression flickered to surprise before it darkened. 

Proxima lunged toward him again, and this time, Thanos made no move to stop her. 

Loki waited until the last moment to step out of her path. He waited until she was almost on top of him, close enough for the edge of her spear to nearly connect with his shoulder, then, in a move he'd practiced more times that he could count on the training grounds on Asgard, he turned and slid forward, using the momentum of her charge to pull her past him. 

She stumbled only a couple of steps forward, but it was enough to send her through the portal he'd conjured with the Space Stone still in his hands. The emptiness swallowed her, and he allowed himself a half-second to imagine the Valkyrie's face when the other woman staggered through. 

He'd have preferred to drop her in the Void, or an active volcano, or something else equally unpleasant, given the option. Without any real expectation of success, he tried to open a portal beneath Thanos' feet, and predictably, the working stuttered and failed. 

It was something he'd learned about the Tesseract fairly early on. Just as the Aether was spiteful and the Mind Stone menacing, the Space Stone had a personality, one that was perhaps best described as...helpful. 

Should he want to travel to a new location, even if he'd only a vague notion of its position? The Tesseract would indulge his whim. Helpfully shuttle an invading army from their base to the Midgardian city Thanos wanted attacked? Absolutely. Need to escape Surtur's flames and make his way off a collapsing Realm and back into a ship that had already launched an unknown distance into space? Done almost before he'd completed the thought. 

But it would not drop him obviously into harm's way, or, it seemed, allow him to do the same to another. The intentions of the person traveling didn't matter—obviously, or he'd never have been able to start the invasion of Earth—but that they arrived safely seemed to. 

So he'd need to lure Thanos through whatever portal he created. Doing so shouldn't prove difficult; after all, he knew exactly what the Titan wanted. 

“I know your plan is to collect the Stones,” he said, holding up the Tesseract while Mind and its malevolent scepter hummed in his dimensional pocket. “Thus far, I have two and you, last I checked, had…” he made a show of counting on his fingers. “None. So I'd say I'm _probably_ the one with the superior planning skills.” 

His most infuriating smirk followed the words for good measure. 

“In fact,” he said, taking a step back as Thanos moved towards him, “I believe it best to delegate the rest of the planning to myself. Which means, of course,” he hefted the Tesseract demonstratively, “that I really ought to be the one keeping these for the time being.” 

He took another couple of steps back as Thanos picked up speed, then abandoned all pretense of dignity to turn and run towards the spot where his escape portal was forming. He opened it slowly, letting it stretch and widen just far enough for him to stretch through as he reached it. 

That way, it would seem less suspicious when it closed slowly as well, leaving enough time for Thanos to come hurtling through after him. 

As always, travel via the Tesseract occurred near-instantly; Sakaar appeared in a flash of blinding light and noxious air. A stray loop of hose caught on his boot and he stumbled, but mercifully he managed to keep his feet and keep driving forward. 

A little ways in front of him, Valkyrie and Proxima Midnight paused in what looked like a tense stand-off, whirling to face him as he ran towards them. Thanos' footsteps shook the earth behind him, growing closer. 

Proxima snarled and lunged toward him, and like before, he waited until the last second to duck to the side, opening up a portal just behind where he had been for her to stumble through. Let her try and cause trouble from back on the worthless chunk of asteroid they'd just left. 

Before he'd finished the thought, something hit him from behind, the impact like a truck ramming full speed into his spine. His feet left the ground and he flew a few feet forward before plowing into the junk-strewn ground and sliding. 

He twisted around far enough to see Thanos looming over him, ghastly, smug grin spreading across his face. He gripped the Tesseract tighter as the titan reached for it, holding it tight against his chest. 

Thanos leaned in, all his attention fixed on the cube of power, eyes fixed and greedy. 

If he'd been any less focused, he'd have noticed the Valkyrie moving in. If she'd been any slower, he would have stopped her in her tracks.

As it was, she emerged from the trash as quickly and quietly as she'd faded into the background a moment before, and a hand shot out lightning-quick to attach a small disc to the side of the Titan's neck, inches below his ear.

His hand came up to slap at the disc just a second too slowly. She stepped back, she pressed the button, and he went down, hard. 

“You didn't warn me about the blue-haired chick,” Valkyrie said sharply when she turned to him. “That was a jerk move.”

Loki wasn't listening. Thanos squirmed on the ground, incapacitated, and Loki felt a wave of elation rising up inside of him. “Not so invincible now,” he said, and aimed a kick at the Titan's ribs. It bounced off, ineffectual, but it still filled him with a dark sort of satisfaction. 

It occurred to him that he had Thanos at his mercy now, after everything, and he could end this now. Easily. Finally. The dagger was in his hand before he had time to think, and then it was falling, down towards an unprotected purple throat. 

It caught, at the last second, on an immaculate silver blade, and he let out a noise in his frustration that might have been a growl, or a small sob. “This wasn't the deal,” the Valkyrie hissed, and he looked up to find her face practically alight with anger. 

“Please,” he said, “he deserves it. He deserves it a thousand times over.” 

She rolled her eyes, and muttered something that sounded like _should have known_ under her breath. “We aren't going to kill a helpless prisoner,” she said, voice tight and angry. 

He laughed, the sound ugly and bitter. “Truly? _That_ is where you draw the line? You'll capture innocents, sell them off to gruesome deaths in the Grandmaster's arena for the entertainment of a bloodthirsty crowd of bottomfeeders, and abandon your home and every oath you swore to protect it in doing so, but killing one evil tyrant while he—” 

The first punch knocked him sprawling, and blood ran in sticky trails from his now-broken nose. “I don't have to listen to this,” she said, and rage made her voice quiver. 

He was beyond caring. He threw himself back at the fallen titan, ready to slash and stab and claw him to pieces, but then the world flipped and when he made sense of where he was, it was on the ground and staring up at the sky with a ringing in his ears and the Valkyrie pinning him down. 

He screamed his frustration, tried to throw her off, but then her sword came down and he saw no more. 

* * *

Loki woke alone in the junk piles, with a throbbing in his head and clotted blood at the back of his throat. He coughed and heaved himself up on the edge of a broken bathtub, spitting in the dirt and battling his dizziness to his feet. Nothing moved except the occasional spray of new trash falling from the portals in the sky. He was alone. 

He wanted to rage, to shout curses at the sky, but the only emotion he could summon was exhaustion. Standing took an effort, and he clung pitifully to the side of the bathtub and took slow deep breaths until the black rings dancing at the edge of his vision disappeared and the worst of his nausea had abated. That done, he pushed himself free and staggered over the junk and towards the city, if it could be called that, rising in the distance. 

Avoiding unpleasant attention was simple enough, now that Loki knew what to expect from the place. The glamor he pulled over himself was simple yet effective. There was a species, not common on the planet but not unknown, with burnt pink skin and blue-black hair. Nature had graced them with the unpleasant yet useful adaptation of emitting a strong foul smell when distressed, and as a result most of the greater community had unanimously elected to neither seek out their company nor do anything to offend them. Safe in this disguise, he could move through the crowds both unmolested and so carefully ignored he may as well have been invisible. There were few on the planet save the Grandmaster himself who could hope to see through the illusion, and avoiding them could be accomplished with very little effort on his part. 

Visiting the local bars meant running the risk of running into a presumably still angry valkyrie, so even though the throbbing pain in his head and face and ribs made him want a drink, he slunk instead into a small restaurant and ordered the planet's closest equivalent of tea. Every place with being similar to those who inhabited the Nine Realms had some variation on the drink, and though Sakaar's was stronger than he would prefer and had an odd floral aftertaste, he gratefully took the opportunity to slump into a chair in the corner and rest. 

Too soon, the hours dwindled away into evening, and the time for the Grandmaster's games approached. Loki bought a cheap ticket and crammed himself into the back of the spectator stands where he could see but was unlikely to be noticed by anyone in the arena. Thanos...probably would not be able to recognize him in this disguise, at this distance, and with the distraction of whoever he was fighting, but still he kept his distance.

Thanos did not show up during the first match, nor the second, and his impatience slowed the time spent waiting to an agonizing crawl. He purchased a drink from a roving vendor with a few coins he slipped surreptitiously from his neighbor's pocket and leaned back, drumming his fingers against the seat in nervous agitation. 

After what seemed like an age, the event reached the final climactic battle. The Grandmaster, or rather, an elaborate and towering illusion of the Grandmaster, stood to address the crowds as the gates opened. 

“Here it is, the part of the night you've all been waiting for; my crowd of adoring fans, I give you the reigning champion of Sakaar!” 

Loki leaned forward in his seat, craning with the rest of the crowds to get a better look. This was before Banner would have found his way here, back when the man and his beastly other form would still be safely on Midgard, so this champion must be a predecessor of sorts that either Banner or another before him had unseated. 

The creature that emerged was tall and gnarled, with rough, bark-like skin and small beady eyes that glinted with barely repressed rage. Loki blinked in surprise. A Flora Colossus off of their home planet was an unusual sight, partly because most examples of the species considered the rest of the galaxy beneath them and avoided contact whenever possible, and partly because their reputation for violence often made them unwelcome in the more organized systems. How one had ended up on Sakaar was a mystery. 

This particular Flora Colossus was old, wooden flesh knotted and tough like a gnarled oak. From what Loki had heard, the species grew stronger with age, and one this size should prove a formidable opponent. 

The champion stomped a few steps forward, threw back his head, and let out a wild, reverberating scream of challenge. The crowd went wild, the cheers nearly drowning out the screams. 

The cheering only quieted down when the announcement resumed, loud and tinny as though heard over a low-quality speaker. “And now, citizens of Sakaar, please give a warm and wild welcome to tonight's challenger!” The Grandmaster's illusion grinned, sleazy yet sharp in all the ways Loki remembered, and the crowd grew louder and more frenetic. “He's big, he's purple, he's got a weird preoccupation with genocide, give it up for our challenger, the Crazy Crusader!” 

Thanos strode out the gate opposite the champion, and for all that Loki expected to see him, his heart still leapt into his throat. The Titan towered nearly a full head taller than his opponent. He looked much as he had when they had ensnared him; evidently the Grandmaster had not had Sakaaran armor to fit his colossal proportions lying around and had not been willing to wait until some could be procured to test the mettle of his new contestant. Patience, Loki remembered, had not been one of the man's virtues. 

Thanos moved steadily and confidently, without hesitation or stumbling, but Loki could just make out the tiny flash of metal at the base of his jaw, evidence that he still wore the obedience disc the valkyrie had fitted him with. He stood to face the champion, and his lip curled with distaste as the tree-like giant roared again to the delight of the crowds. 

“Looks like our champion is in a bit of a mood,” the Grandmaster said, sounding pleased. “What about our challenger? Anything you'd like to say to the crowds before you get down to it?”

When Thanos spoke, his voice carried clear and sharp over the field, likely a trick of the Grandmaster's. “I do not take any pleasure from death that serves no purpose,” he said, and Loki shivered, “but neither will I leave this life with my purpose incomplete. Your death will have meaning because it will allow me to eventually return to my plan of redemption.” 

The applause that followed was scattered and awkward. Loki felt vaguely sick. The Grandmaster might have said something in reply, but if he did Loki couldn't hear it past the ringing in his ears. 

The fight began. 

For all the buildup, it was short, doubtless disappointingly so for those who came as spectators. The champion charged, swinging a great barrel-sized fist that arced a few feet short of Thanos' head. A handful of thick vines shot from his fingers, closing the gap and twisting their way around the Titan's throat. 

Thanos may not have had Sakaaran armor, but someone had managed to procure him a massive double-edged sword, and he held it clenched in one fist. A sweeping arc and it cut through the vines, freeing his throat. The champion danced back, but not quickly enough to keep the next swipe of Thanos' sword from separating the hand from his wrist. 

The Colossus howled with rage; the wound did not bleed and would, if Loki guessed correctly, grow back in time, but the fighter seemed to take the loss as a personal affront. He threw himself forward with redoubled anger behind his movements. 

Loki grimaced. He knew enough of the ebb and flow of battle to recognize the tactical disadvantage of fighting angry, and while he hadn't exactly expected Thanos to lose his first match, he was disappointed nonetheless. 

The fight ended predictably. The first of the Colossus' wild strikes sent Thanos staggering back and clenching his jaw, but he blocked the second and, when the enraged champion sent a wave of vines growing out towards Thanos in retaliation, Thanos grabbed the approaching tendrils, wrapped them around his fist, and used them to jerk his opponent closer. He stumbled forward and onto the Titan's blade, and a sideways jerk divided him cleanly in half. 

The Grandmaster's champion looked confused for a split second and then he toppled slowly forward, sprawling on the ground at the Titan's feet. Thanos reached down and pulled him up, holding him by the back of his neck like a scruffed cat. 

“Peace,” he said, “your death comes in the service of a greater purpose.” 

The Colossus groaned. Thanos dropped him, took a step back, and raised his sword. The killing blow was swift, economical, carried out as one would any other dirty chore. 

The crowd went wild. Loki lurched to his feet, and the people seated next to him leaned even farther away than they had previously when he appropriated a paper bag and retched. 

He could barely make out the faces around him as he stumbled his way out of the arena, relieved to see him go. He pitched forward and caught himself on a wall, then managed to get his feet to carry him the rest of the way to one of the exits. A guard started toward him, recognized the species of his disguise and then pretended conspicuously not to have seen him. 

Loki turned around, enough that he could see Thanos still standing in the center of the arena, the body of his opponent still sprawled on the sand behind him. 

“I have played your game,” Thanos said, “and I have won. Release me now, and I will show you the same mercy as the rest of the universe.” 

“Nuh uh.” The Grandmaster shook his finger, the same stubborn, self-satisfied look that Loki had endured before plastered across his face. “That's not how this works, Mr Crusader, no. You, why, you are a _guest_ here, and guests don't just get to _refuse_ my hospitality. Besides, you've kind of left me without a champion.” He gestured carelessly to the body. “You can't just leave me in the lurch here, not after all that. The people want, no, they _expect_ to have someone to watch, cheer for, buy those little foam finger things. It's an honor you can't refuse.” 

A spasm of irritation crossed Thanos' face. “I have no time for this,” he growled. “You can allow me to leave willingly, or—” 

He seized, convulsed once, and hit the ground hard, one hand over the obedience disc on his neck. 

“I meant that, uh, kinda literally,” the Grandmaster said. “You _can't_ refuse.” 

Loki stumbled the rest of the way outside, gulping down stake air that smelled like rubbish and sweat. He laughed, the sound high, hysterical, and kept himself upright only by clinging to a wall. The other spectators, when the closing spectacle concluded and they came pouring out after him, gave him a wide berth. 

It didn't matter. The tables had turned; Thanos was trapped, and Thanos was helpless, and he could leave and be free in the knowledge that the Titan would be here, fighting unfortunate gladiators or losing and finally fighting no more. 

He stayed there, gasping for breath, until one of the guards worked up the courage to approach him, and then he made his way back into the city to pull himself together before he left this nornsforsaken trash heap of a planet, hopefully for good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for the record I'm with Valkyrie here - a stranger she doesn't know or trust tells her one thing and then turns around and tries to kill an incapacitated prisoner? Not cool, even if with more info we can see it would be a better outcome in the long run.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My eternal gratitude, once again, goes to worstloki for the incredible help with editing and getting this put together.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

Leaving Sakaar as an individual, capable of disguising himself, sheltered by anonymity and without making off with either the Grandmaster's favorite scrapper or his champion, was almost laughably easy. Would have been, probably, even if he didn't have the Tesseract humming contentedly in his pocket dimension.

He left it there, wandered his way out towards the shipyards.

The guards of Sakaar distinguished themselves from the general population with two distinct features; they wore garish uniforms that proclaimed their station and they showed absolutely no interest in socializing, either with the other inhabitants of the planet or with each other. Both of these together made stealing a small ship capable of taking a single passenger through the portals leading to and from Sakaar a simple matter. An illusion and a wordless thousand-yard stare and he was in and out before anyone thought to question him. 

The Tesseract could take him wherever he wanted to go, after all, but it would not guarantee him a place to stay when he arrived. It might be prudent to have a ship, if only until he decided on a destination. 

Because he could admit to himself, even if he would never say it out loud, that he wasn't sure where to _go_.

For all that he'd told himself it wasn't an option to be considered, he toyed with the idea of returning to Asgard. He hadn't been spotted on Midgard this time around, and if he could reach Thor and Frigga before the Allfather realized he'd returned, if he could win them over to his side, he might just be able to escape punishment. If any thought to try and trap him, too, he had the Tesseract and therefore the option to change his mind and be gone at a moment's notice. 

What convinced him otherwise was the dread he felt at imagining what came after. Even in the unlikely case that he was able to avoid any sort of punishment or repercussions from his actions before his fall, even if the revelation of his true ancestry did nothing to change his station or his place in his family, returning would mean a regression to the status quo, a state of events that had driven him nearly mad. To pretend that nothing had changed, to slink back into Thor's shadow and Asgard's disregard—the thought made him want to claw out of his own skin. If even the best he could hope for would be intolerable, better to stay away. 

But he could think of nowhere he wished to be, no place that didn't seem oppressive in its isolation. For all that Thor's friends had never been his, he never had the same sort of friends of his own, and for all that Asgard likely hated him he had few ties to other places. He felt exhausted all the way to his soul, and the thought of finding some unknown place and starting over, of building a new life from scratch and never again seeing the few people he had ever truly cared for sounded unbearable. 

For all the effort he'd put in, all the blood and pain and years spent striving, his victory, once he'd achieved it, felt startlingly hollow. 

He needed a drink, he decided. As soon as possible. 

* * *

The portal he'd taken took him to Asgard, and he planted the ship somewhere on the outer edge and left it behind as he walked a branch of the World Tree. It took him to a small town in Vanaheim, one he remembered from years of adolescent adventuring. He and Thor had enjoyed sneaking off to places remote enough and isolated enough not to recognize wayward young princes; he counted on the same anonymity now. Technically he could have disguised his appearance, but both he and his magic were drained and exhausted, and here on the edge of the world the chance of someone recognizing him was next to nothing. 

He half-sat, half-dropped in a seat at the corner of a disreputable little tavern, and he must have looked almost as bad as he felt because the owner shot him suspicious looks until he dropped some money on the table and raised a hand. Once reassured that he had the means to pay for his drinks, the man served him with alacrity and in merciful silence. 

The first round had barely touched the table when a voice behind him dashed his plans of drinking himself senseless. “Loki?” 

He expected he might feel anger, or perhaps regret, but the emotion that settled like a weight on his shoulders was only a deep and profound weariness. “Sif,” he said. “Fancy running into you here.” 

One hand rested on her sword, and the other gripped the back of his chair. “It is you,” she said, half-incredulous and half-accusatory. “I thought you were supposed to be dead.” 

“Mmm,” he said. “Give me a few hours. I'm contemplating giving myself alcohol poisoning.” 

He tried to raise his glass to his lips, only to have it wrestled away and slammed back down on the table. “How could you do this?” she hissed, and he noticed with a sort of resigned irritation that people had started to stare. “Your family thinks you're dead! Thor hasn't been himself for over a year. The queen, _your mother_ was inconsolable! And now I find you here, hiding from the world and drinking in some backwater pub?” 

Much like a certain Valkyrie. Not that Sif would believe him if he told her. 

The owner of said backwater pub was giving them dirty looks now, so he sighed and stood, waving for her to follow. “It's been a long year and a half,” he said. “Much has happened between now and when we last met.” 

She frowned but trailed out after him. Without even arguing, so he must truly be in bad shape. 

“What happened to you, Loki?” she demanded when they were outside and a little ways away, outside the range of prying ears. 

He laughed, or tried to. It came out a dry croak. “Answering that question would take far more time than we have,” he said, “and I doubt you would believe half of it.” 

A hand tightened on his arm, and he realized he had been swaying. Sif looked up at him with an odd mixture of contempt and concern. Or perhaps one or the other was in his head, conjured up from expectations and imagination. “You need to come back to Asgard,” she was saying. “Let them know you're alive.” 

He shook his head, and she gripped tighter, enough to send a spasm of pain up into his shoulder. “Why, so everyone else can be angry with me for not being dead? No thank you,” he said, and tried to pull away. 

She held on. “That's not why I'm angry.” 

“Isn't it?” 

“ _No_.” She jerked him another step back and scowled. “What have you been _doing_ all this time? Norns, Loki, they think you fell in the _Void_.” 

He made a harsh sound that wasn't quite a laugh. “They're half-right,” he said. “I did not _fall_.” 

For the first time since she'd shown up, she truly looked at him, and he flinched back from her scrutiny. “What happened to you?” she asked again, this time quietly. 

“What does it matter?” He took a step back. “I don't owe you an explanation, nor an accounting of my actions or whereabouts.” 

She huffed, a small sound of frustration. “You may not owe it to me,” she said, “but you certainly owe your family, for the heartache you put them through.”

“And what could I possibly say that would improve matters?” He took a deep breath, frustrated by the way it shook. “Would it help them to know to what depths I have clawed my way out of, what pains I have endured?” 

“So long as it is you telling them, standing before them alive and well, I assume it will be enough,” she said. She caught hold of his wrist, and pulled him forward a few steps before enough of his thoughts were pulled back to the present for him to jerk and tug himself back, winning a few steps in the direction opposite where she was dragging him. 

“What do you think you're doing?” 

“I'm taking you back to Asgard,” Sif said. Her grip on his wrist tightened. “There's a clearing in a little ways, suitable for the Bifrost. I mean to bring you home,” she said in a firm tone of voice that invited no arguments. 

He swallowed, and shook his head. “I will not go,” he said simply. “Asgard is not my home.”

Her jaw set. “I don't remember asking,” she said, “and I don't particularly care what you think. You've sulked in these backwaters long enough, Loki, and you owe it to everyone who's ever cared about you to stop now.” 

He'd sulked in these backwaters for less than ten minutes before she showed up and started in with her demands, but he didn't think pointing that out would help anything. 

Instead, he twisted and pulled and aimed a strike at her wrist just above where she had a hold of him, forcing her to let go, and took another step back. 

She scowled, reached for him again and he deflected, knocking her hands away. Their eyes met, barely-restrained anger against defiance, and then the fight began in earnest. 

Sif rushed him, more frustration than actual strategy, and he turned her aside, using her momentum to send her stumbling into a tree. 

She came at him again, and this time when he went to pull her past she went low, slamming into his legs and sending him sprawling onto the ground. One hand bunched the fabric of his collar at his throat, driving into his airway, and the other sent a hot rush of pain blooming through his cheekbone. 

He levered both hands against the wrist of the hand choking him and jerked viciously until he was rewarded by a sharp cry of pain, then used the torque to roll her off and regain his feet. 

Sif was, as always, in top fighting shape, and she'd won four of every five sparring matches they'd fought in training, but he'd learned just enough new tricks in the time since they'd last fought to keep her off-balance. In addition, she'd chosen the harder battle. All he had to do was prevent her from pinning him such that she could drag him along; actually doing so would prove far more difficult. 

He slammed an elbow into her nose hard enough for it to crunch, and she pressed forward far enough to drive him to the ground again, hard. One knee drove into his ribs and a sharp forearm levered against his throat. 

He drew a bit of magic to the surface, and she jerked back and off of him as a freezing cold flash of skin burned into her arm. She rolled off of him, clutching the arm, and he let that bit of familiar magic settle back into place. 

When he looked up she was glaring at him, cradling the arm he'd burned. Only just a thin strip of blistered skin showed through the fingers of her other hand; it looked painful but not debilitating. It should heal quickly with or without a healer's assistance. 

Silence hung in the air for a moment while she stared at him and he stared back, at a silent impasse. 

“Fine,” she said at last, wiping her bloodied nose with the edge of her sleeve, “fine, be this way if you want to.” He sat in a collapsed pile, still breathing hard and feeling the bruises form with a still-sharp ache. “Norns know you won't listen to reason when you're like this,” she said. “I'm going to tell Thor that you're here. Maybe he can talk some sense into you.” 

“That seems unlikely,” he said, and she shot him one more exasperated look before she turned and walked off, leaving him alone once again. 

As soon as she had gone he started the painful process of dragging himself upright, and he staggered a few steps before he steadied himself. More than the bruises from their fight left him unsteady; he felt light, drained and empty in a way that made him want to lie down and not move for a very long while. 

Only if he did that, Thor would probably find him and that would be worse. Might be worse. It was hard to tell how he felt about all of that just now. 

He stumbled a short ways until he found a rock promontory, worn stone not quite high enough to be called a cliff, and sat down on the edge, lowering himself on shaking legs. 

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a terrible thing if Thor found him. The thought of wandering aimlessly through unfamiliar places, alone, for all his long life was still almost enough to have him running home like a well-trained pet returning to its kennel. 

But, he reminded himself again, even in the unlikely case that Asgard had saved his place for him, wouldn't brand him a criminal and condemn him to rot--well, he'd never fit even at the best of times, before anything and everything had gone wrong. Trying to squeeze himself back into that old skin was unthinkable and any change offered was likely to be for the worst. 

But without a way to move forward or a will to go back, what options were left to him? 

Perhaps he should do as he told Sif he would and try to drink himself to death. It hadn't worked for the Valkyrie, but perhaps she simply wasn't as proficient in the art of self-destruction as he. 

Back, then, to the same conclusion as before, his mind running in predictable circles like a snake biting its own tail.

An irritating sound pulled him out of his thoughts, a distant hum that grated again his nerves. He looked up, searched the sky, and spotted a shape in the distance, growing as it drew closer. 

He'd never seen the ship before, but the dread that settled in the pit of his stomach as soon as he saw it was sickeningly familiar. He had neither evidence nor doubt as to who the craft belonged to. 

Well, it saved him the trouble of working out what to do with his future, at least. A resigned weariness settled back into his gut, heavy and immovable as Mjolnir herself. 

Perhaps he should have tried to run, or to fight, or at least to warn someone else of what was coming, but he didn't have the will. The ship drew up alongside where he sat and then set down, crushing fields and trees and underbrush alike, and he watched with the same numbness. 

A door on the grounded ship split open at its seam, sliding aside easily, and the opening that it revealed would have dwarfed most species to climb on board. Even Thanos looked almost small standing in the doorway. 

A long scar ran down one side of the titan's face, and the eye on that side was capped with a patch of bronze metal. White paint trailed down the other in stark geometric patterns, calling to mind a particularly ugly style of art that Loki had come to hate on his first trip to Sakaar. Thanos' armor, too, was not as he recognized, and instead reflected a now-familiar juxtaposition of well-made and utterly gaudy that was the Grandmaster's trademark.

The time on Sakaar, years, probably, that had run in the blink of an eye to anyone not on that planet with its strange distortions in spacetime, had clearly not treated him kindly, but he still had the same malicious grin. It spread across his face when he caught sight of Loki. “I've been looking for you,” he said, and Loki climbed to his feet, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Looking for vengeance after I trapped you on Sakaar?” It occurred to him to wonder whether Valkyrie had also been a target of the Titan's vendetta, and whether she had survived it. Not that it mattered--things would reset again, and soon, leaving her without even the memory of her possible untimely demise. 

“To the contrary,” Thanos said, “I wanted to thank you.” 

That finally sent a shiver of alarm through him. He'd faced the Titan's wrath before, more than once, but the thought of having done something to earn his gratitude filled him with a sort of sick dread. “Oh?”

One of Thanos' hands crept to the hilt of a long sword, one of a pair hanging at his belt, fingers playing across the metal. 

“That planet...” he said, and his grip tightened, “it strengthened my resolve. Reminded me what the dregs of the universe look like when allowed to run unchecked, and gave me a new perspective on my ultimate goal. A universe at peace.”

He drew the weapon and looked along its length thoughtfully, tilting it back and forth and watching the light play off its edges. “I used to think I could accomplish it by wiping out half of all life at random,” he continued, “leaving greater resources and less conflict for the half that remained. But I have just seen a planet with no scarcity, a place of plenty by all measures, and still the inhabitants were beset with war and strife. It is clear that my original plan will not give me the peace I so desire, and so I have come up with a new plan.” 

Loki swallowed. “Dare I ask?”

“I will wipe out almost all life in the universe, leaving behind only a few chosen who value peace the way I do. No rabble-rousers to create strife, no dissent to drag the people down into war. There will be only the select, the good, the virtuous.” 

Loki choked, and the Titan gave him a contemptuous look. “I didn't think your plan could get any worse,” he managed through the knot in his throat. 

“I know,” Thanos said, and for all the disgust that burned in his eyes his voice was almost gentle. “It's not a plan for the small-minded or the weak of heart. The necessary is not always pleasant, and may seem unbearable to those who cannot see its necessity.” 

“Myself included, I'm assuming,” he said, and the terror from before started to settle into some measure of peace. This wasn't so different from before; he would die, the world would end, and he'd be right back where he started. Again. Nothing more than the routine flavor of catastrophe. 

“Precisely.” Thanos still studied the sword, making no move to attack, but the intensity of his scrutiny was a threat in of itself. 

“And let me guess,” he continued, “you're here to begin your work of killing the majority of the known universe with me?” 

“A fitting reward for one who played their part well, albeit with difficult intentions,” he agreed. “I had thought, once, to make you suffer for your disobedience when I sent you to Terra, but now I think you've earned your quick death.”

“Lovely.” 

“You don't mean that,” he said, “but perhaps, if you truly understood, you would.” 

Thanos moved, then, almost quicker than thought, and maybe if he'd had the will he could've moved, parried, clung to this life for whatever scraps of time he could buy himself. But fighting for his life was so much struggle for so little gain, and fighting another losing battle was more than the universe had a right to ask of him. 

There was hardly any pain, little enough that he was almost willing to consider it a mercy, and then he was back in the SHIELD bunker, again, feeling worn thin and barely clinging to whatever sanity he could claim. 

He couldn't say what had changed—he tried using the same bribe, same words, and maddeningly many variants thereof—but the Valkyrie never agreed to help him again. Perhaps she could read that his intent had changed (he would kill the titan given half a chance, too fast for her to stop him this time), perhaps she only saw his desperation and wisely steered clear, but his pleading and bribes and threats went equally unheeded. 

There was another option, one that had occurred to him some time ago but that he had decided to set aside until he was devoid of other possibilities and truly desperate. 

That time, he thought, had most likely come. 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I get a bit carried away with the size of this chapter? Almost definitely.
> 
> Should I be sorry about that? Probably.
> 
> Am I? Nope.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to worstloki for great editing and suggestions, and thank you to everyone who is still reading! I appreciate you all. ❤️

Breaking into the Vault was not easy. It also wasn't hard. 

Aesir guards stood at the door, but sneaking invisibly by had never been difficult, not for a creature of the shadows. The newly rebuilt destroyer, for all his fear, held its place at his approach. None had bothered to warn it of him, and no wonder. They had thought him dead. 

The only sentinels stood in his memory, ghostly images of times past that preyed on his mind. There, the pedestal that had held the Casket of Ancient Winters, the spot where his fears had been confirmed and the lies of his childhood crumbled. Here, a replica of the Gauntlet, a prototype, and if it was fake he could still feel the fingers closing around his throat. 

There, the Eternal Flame, in the end the tool that allowed him to destroy Asgard only after he no longer wanted to. Ironic, in a way, that the Frost Giant should have brought about an apocalypse of flame. Perhaps it meant something. Perhaps he needed it to, because otherwise there was only him, laying ruin to his once-home as he had with everything else in his life. 

He stopped in front of the dancing flames, roaring and feeding on the ambient magic of Asgard. Eventually, it would consume her very core, a distant inevitability in the way that Midgard would eventually be swallowed by the collapse of her sun. 

He brushed tentative fingers against the edges of the flame, expecting them to blister, but the fires of death burned cold. He wondered if it would be too cold, then, for another to touch, but he pushed the thought away. 

It was the work of a moment to section off a part of the flames, separate them from the rest and draw them carefully out. The original seemed no smaller, after; fire did not diminish in being shared. 

Magic shaped the flames, compressed them, until he held a compact sphere, burning almost too bright to look at. He drew it in, took it into himself, until the sphere had disappeared and the flames of death burned within a prison of his flesh. He had to double over and grit his teeth until they settled, and the sharp pain that lanced through him subsided. 

He straightened. 

That made half of what he needed to put his plan into action. The other half, Surtur's crown, would be a bit trickier in the getting. Before, it had already been in the Vault, stored and ready for him to use, but now Thor had not yet challenged the king of the fire giants and stolen the artifact of power. Technically, Loki could try to fight the being himself, but he doubted that being a Frost Giant who challenged a Fire Giant in the heart of the world of flames would end terribly well for him. 

Which left him only one true option, then. Thor was the only person whom he both knew for a fact could defeat Surtur and could probably be persuaded to help him do it. 

Thor thought he was dead. 

Well. Thor had thought so before, though he didn't remember, and this revelation of Loki's survival might prove more graceful than some. It could hardly be worse than the times Thor had attempted to murder him seconds after learning he survived, as he had after Loki's failed death on Svartalfheim. 

He resolved to wait until Thor was alone. Better that he be away from the palace, too, as he might put up a fuss and summon others that Loki didn't particularly want to know of his plans. Once upon a time this would have been a simple thing; Thor went camping frequently, and stomping about deserted parts of the woods even more frequently. 

But this Thor was at once more sociable and more reserved than the one he had left. His brother didn't stray as far from home as he once had, circling in a tighter orbit than the unmoored wandering he had frequently engaged in before, and it was difficult to catch him alone. He'd walk with Frigga in her gardens, train in the yards with their friends, and go drinking in small alehouses on the edges of the city. The only time Loki found him alone was when he walked out to the end of the shattered Bridge to ask Heimdall about Foster and carefully avoid looking over the edge. 

Loki waited for a time, but his store of patience was limited and hanging around his brother like a shadow quickly exhausted it. 

He approached in a disguise, illusion carefully secured before he approached. “Thor,” he said, and his brother turned, and smiled. 

“Sif,” he said, “it's good to see you. If you're here for a rematch, the training grounds are—” 

“No,” he said quickly, “Not that. Thor, we need to talk.” His brother's smile collapsed, turned vaguely worried. “Walk with me?” 

“Of course,” he said, and he matched Loki's steps as he took them down the hall. 

They walked in silence for a time, Thor showing uncharacteristic patience as Loki took them out into the woods, far enough that they were unlikely to run into anyone besides the deer. He took them deeper and deeper still, edging them towards an area where he knew the walls between worlds were thinner and it would be easier to travel along the branches of Yggdrasil. That was the reason he waited; he wasn't stalling, not putting off their conversation in favor of walking because walking was easier and less likely to be painful. 

Unfortunately, he knew a lie when he heard it, even if he was the one telling it. 

At last Thor stopped, and Loki was caught up enough in his thoughts that he kept walking and made it a few yards further before he noticed. He turned to find Thor with his arms crossed, frowning. 

“Sif,” he said cautiously, “what is this about?” 

Loki sighed to himself, but it seemed he couldn't put off this conversation any longer. “I need you to promise me you won't react until I've finished explaining,” he said, and it made Thor frown more deeply. 

“React to what?” 

“Just...promise me you'll at least try to listen before you act on your anger,” he said. 

Thor still looked wary, and like he was concerned for his friend's sanity. “Sif,” he said, “you know I wouldn't—” 

Loki let the illusion drop, and whatever Thor had been about to say caught in his throat. He choked. “Loki?” 

“I'm here because I need your help,” he said quickly. 

Thor didn't look angry, not like he had when he'd found Loki on Midgard causing trouble, or heartsick, as when he'd pretended to be his own ghost. His actual expression was difficult to pin down. “Is this real?” he asked quietly. Too quietly. 

“Yes,” Loki said simply, “it's truly me, and I'm truly here.” 

Thor's shoulders fell a little bit, and Loki was finally able to identify the expression on his face. _Relief_. Thor looked profoundly relieved, like some part of the world that had been incorrect had finally shifted back into alignment. “Thank the Norns,” he said, “I thought you were dead.” 

Loki studied him. “You don't seem surprised,” he said cautiously, as though stepping out on thin ice. 

Thor laughed, but the sound had no humor in it. “I expected this,” he said. 

That...was not what Loki expected him to say. “...truly?” 

Thor shook his head. “Not now, not...today, but the weeks and months after you fell? I always half-expected you to show up. I thought that maybe I'd turn a corner and you'd just...be there, or I'd go to your room in the morning and find you sleeping in your bed like always, and we could reconcile and everything would be all right. Even though I knew better, a part of me was so sure it had to be a trick, but then it had been so long and I thought I must be wrong and you were gone after all, except now here you are.” 

“Here I am.” Loki didn't trust this strange calm, Thor's lack of a reaction. It felt like the calm before a storm, and knowing who he was dealing with, it probably was. 

Thor swallowed; the muscles around his eyes were tight. “Why now?” he said. “Why did you let us think you were dead for so long?” 

“I fell through the Void,” he said. “It wasn't exactly easy to claw my way out. Believe me, I haven't been sitting around and letting you mope around in my absence for the fun of it.” 

Not this time, at least. 

The look Thor gave him was unreadable. 

“Much has happened since I fell.” And wasn't that the understatement of the century. It made him want to laugh, maybe, or maybe just scream. “But I'm here now, and I need you to—” 

He'd been lulled into a false sense of complacency, and Thor moved too quickly for him to react. His sentence cut itself short as the breath was driven from his lungs, forced out by the impact as his entire brother barreled into him with enough force to drive him into the ground. He would've gone down if it weren't for the solid arms wrapped around him, squeezing out what little air he had left. 

He let it go in a short huff. “And here I thought you were being surprisingly reasonable for once,” he managed, still gasping for breath. 

“Shut up.” Thor squeezed tighter as though to enforce the order. 

“Is this your way of letting me know you're angry with me?” he gasped. “Snapping my ribs one by one until I regret coming to you?” 

Thor made a low sound in his chest that almost could have been a laugh. “I will most likely be angry with you later,” he said, and he didn't loosen his crushing grip even a little. “Once I have had time to adjust to you being alive, but for now I am only immeasurably glad to have you back.” 

After another moment passed and it became clear that Thor had no intention of letting go just yet, he very intentionally made himself relax. He didn't _enjoy_ having the life squeezed out of him, but this could have gone much worse, and while it didn't make him feel safe--that would be far more naive than he'd been even before this mess--he could almost, if he closed his eyes, forget for a second that he was still trapped mid-disaster, still falling with no way to right himself. 

When Thor finally let go they were both a little unsteady, but neither mentioned it. Loki straightened and brushed the wrinkles out of his clothes, and Thor offered a smile, watered-down but genuine. 

“We should go back,” he said at last. “Let Mother and Father know you are still—” 

“No.” 

Thor frowned, starting to look mutinous. “Loki,” he said, the word in of itself a reproach. “You cannot let them continue to believe—” 

“Later,” he said. “Right now, I need your help. Urgently.” 

Thor frowned. “It cannot be so dire as that,” he said. 

“It can, and is.” Loki took a step back, leveling Thor with his most serious look. “If you will not help me I shall go attempt it alone, and I cannot promise that I would return.” 

He didn't miss the fear that crossed Thor's face like a shadow at that. “What is it you wish of me?”

He almost laughed at Thor's open apprehension. “No, don't worry, you'll like it.”

“What is it?” Thor asked again, unconvinced. 

“I need you to slay a giant.” Thor frowned, and for a second he wondered what could have happened to make Thor look so uncertain about his favorite pastime, but then it hit him. “I'm not the giant in question,” he promised. “I need you to defeat Surtur.”

“Surtur?” Thor said, like an obnoxious echo. “The King of Muspelheim?”

“That's the one,” he said, infusing his voice with enough false cheer that Thor frowned. “Will you do it?” 

“No.” 

The answer drew him up short. “What do you mean, no?” He didn't mean to snap the words out, filled with irritation, but this would be difficult enough without Thor adding his own difficulty to the situation. 

“I do not know the cause of this vendetta you have declared against giants,” Thor said, “but I will not be a part of it. They are people, like you or I, and to persecute them out of hatefulness is unworthy of us.” 

_People more like me than you_ , he almost shot back, but he snapped his teeth shut over the reply because riling Thor up for a fight would most likely be counterproductive now. Instead, he did his best to keep his voice calm, reasonable. “This is no unthinking vendetta,” he said smoothly, refusing to take the bait when Thor returned an unimpressed look. “I have nothing against the people of Muspelheim, on the whole, but Surtur has a powerful weapon that he intends to use against Asgard. I merely mean for us to confiscate it before it can be used against us.”

Thor frowned again, but this time it was a considering frown. “That is your only reason for proposing this quest?” 

Loki raised a hand. “I swear to you, Thor,” he said seriously, “that my sole interest in defeating Surtur is in removing from him a weapon that he can and will use to bring Asgard to harm.” 

It was not a particularly strong oath, but no oath was a thing to be taken lightly, and if Thor retained any regard for him at all he would accept it. 

And it seemed that Thor's opinion of him had not sunk so low, this time at least, that he would not accept his sworn word. The suspicion cleared from his face, replaced by the sunny smile Loki had expected before. “In that case I don't see the harm in it,” he said happily, eager despite the pretended reluctance in his voice.

“Good,” he said, and nodded. “Let's go.”

* * *

Loki had known, buried somewhere in the part of his brain that stored dry and obvious facts, that Muspelheim was _hot_. 

He also knew, somewhere in the part of his brain that stored the things he'd rather forget, that he was a Frost Giant, born in the frozen wastelands of Jotunheim and, while perhaps not quite suited to them after a childhood spent in the eternally temperate Asgard, then at the very least designed for them. 

Taken together, these facts added up to an extremely unpleasant experience. They'd barely emerged from the path he'd charted for them between worlds before a headache pounded in his skull and throbbed behind his eyes. The air had a dry, gritty texture, like all moisture had fled the planet in search of more hospitable air to hang around in, and the combination of the dryness and the heat left his skin feeling stretched and ready to crack. After the first few minutes unpleasant tendrils of nausea crept up the back of his throat.

He swallowed. His mouth felt dry. 

The only thing that kept him from succumbing almost immediately to the heat, from melting into a puddle or evaporating or doing whatever it was Jotnar did when literally baked alive, was the consistent coolness of the Eternal Flame still burning at his core, chilling him from within even as his skin scorched. It was an odd sensation, to burn and freeze at the same time, like having one hand in ice water and the other in the oven. He shivered involuntarily and cleared his dry throat. 

“Are you all right?” Thor was assessing him, and Loki couldn't tell from the look on his face whether he, too, was remembering Loki's icy heritage, or whether he was simply thinking back to all the times during their growing-up where Loki had wilted in the summer afternoons or sickened from overheating. 

“I'm fine,” he said, and the heat and reminder of his weakness for it made him snappish. “Let's get this done quickly and get out of here.” 

“You'll have no argument from me,” Thor said, and wiped a thin sheen of sweat off his brow with the edge of his cape. Loki swallowed down another wave of nausea and bit down on his tongue. 

As they walked, he found himself wondering if there was a way to use magic and bring the temperature in their immediate vicinity down to a more reasonable level. The issue was that the heat itself could not be gotten rid of, only transferred, and in a place so consistently hot there was no good or easy place to transfer it to. 

It was technically possible to convert the heat to a different sort of energy, but that was magic of a magnitude that would take a significant magical artifact to achieve. Was, in fact, the mechanism by which the Jotun Casket of Ancient Winters worked, converting ambient heat to raw magic energy that could then be used by its wielder, and freezing its surroundings almost as an afterthought. 

The Casket of Ancient Winters which he had, sitting in his extradimensional storage where it had been, mostly undisturbed, since he stashed it there before he fell. 

He briefly considered using it, remembered that it brought his true Jotun skin to the surface, and then imagined how the heat, already unbearable, would feel in that form. The idea of using it was abandoned before he had the chance to remember that doing so would also mean appearing Jotun in front of Thor, and that in of itself was enough to argue for leaving the Casket where it was. 

So he continued to bake in the deeply unpleasant heat that still couldn't reach far enough inside him to thaw his freezing ribs, and he wondered if heatstroke wouldn't be preferable to the strange feverish sensation where the heat and cold battled within him. 

It left his head foggy and his feet unsteady. They tangled with a rock, the only bit of texture on a path made of smooth volcanic stone, and only Thor's hand on his shoulder saved him from planting face first on the broiling ground. 

“Are you certain you're well?” he asked, and Loki only grunted in response. “If the heat is too much you can wait back in Asgard.” 

“You don't even know what you're looking for.” The heat rising from the ground bent the shapes of distant mountains in dizzying waves, making them seem to pulse and dance. 

Thor frowned. “I can figure it out.” 

Thor had figured it out, once before, but Loki wasn't sure how and wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. “I'll be fine, Thor,” he said. Thor only shook his head. 

He would, too. The Eternal Flame kept him sharp and alert, keeping him alive and well if not free from pain. 

Or perhaps it wouldn't keep him alive so much as resurrect him if he died, smoothing the transition from alive to undead until he wouldn't be aware when or if it occurred. The thought made him shudder, but he suppressed it along with the shivers that had become a constant annoyance to hold back. 

When he was saved from his thoughts by a large rock that shuddered and shifted and turned out to be less rock and more viciously angry flaming giant salamander determined to eat them for disturbing its nap, it was almost a relief. 

The beast hissed as it uncoiled, the sound like water thrown on hot coals, and it startled him from his thoughts into an awkward half-stumble. 

“Look out,” Thor said a second after he'd already jumped out of the way, and he spared another second to shoot his brother an irritated look before he pulled a set of daggers out of the air and crouched for a fight. 

The first swipe of the creature's claws came close enough that he had to dance back out of the way, and the spot where they'd passed burned hot enough he thought for a second he'd been scratched. The sensation faded as the flames retreated, though, and a quick glance down showed that his clothes hadn't even been torn, so he grit his teeth and flung a knife that bit into the delicate skin beneath the creature's eye. 

It shrieked, the sound high and bubbling from its throat like magma, and attempted to charge him. 

Before it could get close, an immovable hammer slammed into its rock hard skull, pushing it back even as its claws scrabbled on the rock for purchase. An arc of electricity snapped against its skin a second later, not enough to do more than irritate it, but still it swung around towards Thor with an earthquake-low growl. 

Loki used the distraction to edge closer, conjuring a short wall of invisible force for the creature to stumble over. He held his knife at the ready, watching for an opening. 

It righted itself before he could strike, and the massive jaws closed too close to his skull for comfort, forcing him back once more. 

A large bit of rock shook loose from the ceiling and bounced off the thing's head; likely Thor's doing. It shook itself, slightly dazed and uncoordinated but angry and no less deadly. 

The opening, when it came, was in the worst possible spot, as far from his reach as it could be. The creature swiped with its left claw at where he stood on its right side, twisting in a way that left a long expanse of its neck exposed on the side opposite from him. Even with a sword, he'd need to get closer in order to get in an effective kill strike; with a dagger, getting past the creature's fiery claws in order to get close enough before the opening closed would be incredibly dangerous. 

The air scorched his lungs as he took a deep breath and plunged forward, missing the razor sharp claws by a hairsbreadth as he ducked and twisted. Flames scorched the tips of his hair, and he could smell it burning as he felt the heat on his neck, too close for comfort. 

He had almost reached the opening, just in the nick of time, when a familiar rush of air and a strangled cry interrupted his focus. His brain caught up in a split second and he fell, letting his knees give out under him and the momentum carry him down. 

Mjolnir whistled as it passed over his head, inches from crushing his skull and directly through where he'd been a split-second before. Thor must've seen the same opening he had and been in a better position to react, because in the next instant the hammer connected with the vulnerable side of the beast's neck. It all but disappeared from above him, driven back with a sharp hiss of released air as it collapsed and toppled backwards and away. 

Loki rolled to his feet, dodging just in time to avoid the hammer on its path back to Thor's hand. The creature remained down, not stirring, and whether it was dead or simply incapacitated by its collapsed windpipe it was clear that it would pose no further threat to them.

Loki stumbled to regain his balance and paused, taking deep breaths and blinking at the spot where the beast had been.

“What was that?” he flinched from Thor's tone, but his brother wasn't wrong to ask the question. Loki should have anticipated Thor's moves, should have planned them out alongside his own and adjusted his strategy accordingly. 

They'd battled together for centuries, but somehow in the past few years Loki had gotten used to fighting on his own. 

“I saw an opening and I took it,” he said simply, though Thor already knew as much. His brother's frown deepened. 

“I was right there,” Thor said, sounding, absurdly, a little hurt. As though he'd been the one to nearly have his head taken off. 

“So you were.” He brushed himself off, doing his best to look unconcerned.

Thor kept frowning, but didn't say anything else. They returned to the path they had been following in silence.

The adrenaline that had carried him through the fight faded as they walked, and his joints ached relentlessly in the heat. Worse, sulfur in the air stung his nose and eyes, acrid and unpleasant. 

“You're certain this is the way to Surtur's palace?” 

Loki gave Thor a sharp look, but his brother only studied the path ahead of them thoughtfully. “According to the maps,” he said. “I haven't vacationed here, if that's what you're asking.” 

“It wouldn't be all bad,” Thor said. “A bit hot and empty, but you get used to it.” 

“Maybe _you_ get used to it,” he muttered, but Thor gave him a concerned look, and he let it go. 

“Do you think…” Thor said after they'd traveled a little bit further, and then trailed off. 

So he was in one of those moods. Loki sighed internally. “I do,” he said. “Often. You ought to try it.” 

Thor huffed. “Your difficulties with the heat,” he said. “Do you think it's because you are…” 

“Because I'm what,” Loki said, even though he was almost certain he knew the answer. 

Thor swallowed, and then did look like he was thinking, and the exercise was painful. “Nothing,” he said at last. 

Loki raised an eyebrow. “I'm nothing? Here I was thinking I existed. Foolish of me.” 

“No, just…forget I said anything,” Thor said. 

“Gladly,” he said, and thought he meant it. Benign as Thor's intentions likely were at this time, he'd absolutely no desire to discuss his heritage, and less to do so now, while they trudged along a trail of crumbled volcanic rock and breathed air full of superheated dust. 

They trailed on in relative silence through the stifling heat, and Loki breathed carefully so as not to choke on the thin layer of dirt they stirred up as they walked. 

“Not a very populous place, is it?” Thor said after a bit. Talking to fill the silence more than having something to say, by Loki's estimation. 

“My understanding is that most of the giants who reside here are in cities, many of them underground,” Loki replied. “Most aboveground land not dedicated to agriculture is abandoned.” 

“Hmm,” Thor said without any real feeling, “I wonder why that is.” 

“Mostly because of the giant fire salamanders and so forth,” he said. 

“Ah.” 

“In any case, we're drawing near to Surtur's dwelling,” he said. 

Thor frowned. “How can you tell?” 

He gestured to the ground, the dirt road gradually giving way to pacing stones of cool dark rock, carefully fitted. “Call it a hunch.” 

Thor stared at the ground in confusion that cleared after a few seconds. “Ah,” he said, “so we are.” 

“Not a moment too soon,” Loki couldn't help but add. “The sooner we make it off this baked rock, the better.” 

He meant it, too. The heat stifled, it suppressed, it cracked his skin and dried out his lungs and left him constantly tempted to spirit himself away and find someplace with snow to lay down and not move. 

“I agree,” Thor said, nodding with enthusiasm. “It will be good to return home, and you can finally tell Mother and Father that you aren't dead. I know you said this quest was urgent, brother, but I still believe that you ought at least to have let them know you live.” 

The sense of relief he imagined at finally leaving the heat behind evaporated. He'd not actually return as Thor suggested, not if all went according to plan, but the thought sent something clenching in his chest that wasn't from the temperature. 

“Look,” he said, as much to distract himself from the idea as to deflect Thor, “I believe that to be the entrance to Surtur's halls.”

Indeed, the ground opened a short ways off, a grand chasm that descended with stairs too large for any their size to comfortably walk. They were grand in a foreboding way, as if styled for intimidation rather than aesthetic appeal. 

“Where are the guards?” Thor asked, no doubt imagining the Einherjar stationed at Asgard's palace gates. 

“There's another gate below ground,” he answered. “It's likely someone will be stationed there.”

They crept down as silently as they could, and absurdly, the combination of large stairs and furtive movements drew him back to childhood adventures, trying to sneak out quietly in the dead of night when they were meant to be in their beds. They might try to steal pastries from the kitchen, or sneak their way out into the gardens, and as much as their goal was now far more serious and the consequences of being caught unaware more dire, the memories brought the same feelings stirring up in his chest.

They made it to the bottom in a fairly short time; the caves, for all that they were made for giants, were not that deep. Thor crept forward far enough to peer around the bottom of the stairs and held up a hand. Six guards in total, two on the left, two on the right, and two more lounging against a far wall. They didn't look particularly alert; Odin would never have stood for such a slack approach to the job, but then again Surtur must not have the ability to spy on his subjects from an all-seeing throne.

They took a few steps back up the stairs, far enough that they could whisper without being overheard.

“We should do the news,” Thor said immediately, grinning at him in a way that, despite him being an adult, could perhaps best be described as impish. 

“That's a terrible idea,” he said, but Thor kept grinning. 

“Come on, you know you want to,” he said.“You _love_ the sound of your own voice.” 

“That's reductive and insulting.” 

“But it's also true.” He shrugged. “You're good at spinning a tale,” he said. “There's nothing wrong with enjoying it. And besides, we haven't any better ideas.” 

“There are many better ideas.” 

“Well, none that I want a part in,” Thor said, getting his hammer.“So will you do it, or should we rush in and start a proper brawl?” 

Loki huffed. “Fine.” 

Disguising himself as a fire giant was the work of several long minutes. He chose a form with moderate height, crafting the skin with a texture like volcanic rock and just enough radiated heat that its absence wouldn't be suspicious. The lighting was tricky, as well, a glow from within that shone red-orange and lit up his false profile. 

When he was comfortable that he had a passable disguise—Thor gave him a vague thumbs-up when asked—Loki gathered himself and strode into the room, adopting the casual and confident gait of an entertainer. 

“I come bearing the day's news,” he announced to the gathered room full of giants, and the vaguely suspicious glares that had fallen on him when he first entered turned quickly to irritation. “That is,” he added, “if you be willing to pay for it.” 

“We'd rather not hear it,” one giant said, and grumbled agreement swept through the room. 

“Then I shall continue to speak it, and you may pay for my silence,” he said easily, and the hostility directed at him grew, hanging in the air like a palpable fog. “But lest you think the news I carry is dull, know that Thor the Thunderer, prince of Asgard, was spotted in Muspelheim.”

The guards traded uneasy glances at that. Muspelheim may be remote, but it still resided within the Nine Realms, and it was not so far that Thor's reputation failed to precede him. 

“What's he doing here?” Loki grinned to himself; for all their grumbling, his captive audience has been hooked. 

“He slew a great Salamander not far from here,” Loki said. “Smashed its throat in with his great hammer, while bolts of lightning rained down from the sky. The earth shook when it fell, such that those sleeping in far-off houses felt the tremor like a shiver of dread, though they knew not where it came from.” He hunched into himself, glancing around conspiratorially, and his audience leaned in. “He ripped the beast's head from its shoulders with his bare hands to keep as a trophy, then tossed it aside when he found it was not to his liking. Who knows what worthier game he must even now be seeking?” 

“Nonsense,” one of the giants said, but he looked worried all the same. 

“Where is he now?” another asked, and it was to this question Loki turned his attention. He paused as though to gather his thoughts, waited until he had the full attention of the room, and then let a slow, sinister smile creep across his face.

“Now, at this moment? He is behind you,” he said, and then Thor howled, an enraged sound that was half battle cry and half deranged wolf impression. 

The giants startled and scattered, reacting with panicked confusion. Several took off at a dead sprint, hurtling through the door and away from danger, while those that remained went after Thor with neither tactics nor coordination. 

Thor took down several with his first swing; the rest lived long enough to regret forgetting Loki was there and turning their backs on him, but not much longer. 

When the dust settled, they stood alone in a room with several corpses, facing each other. Loki let go of his disguise, shrinking back into his own skin. 

“All that noise will have attracted attention,” he said mildly. Thor shrugged. 

“Let them come. We're looking for a fight in any case.”

“You're looking for a fight,” he muttered. “I'm simply hoping we can prevent a disaster.” 

Thor wasn't listening, or else he pretended not to hear. 

The sound of approaching footsteps cut off any further protest he might have made. Thor gripped his hammer and dropped into a fighting crouch, but Loki put a restraining hand in his arm, drawing them back into the shadows. From there, the spell that would hide them from sight was a simple one, practiced to the point where it took barely more than a thought to disappear.

Thor, miraculously, lapsed into silence alongside him, still and waiting rather than arguing. 

A moment later, the gate the giants had been guarding swung open from the other side, and a small band of warriors with weapons drawn rushed through. They stumbled to a halt at the sight of their slaughtered comrades, and the shouts of warning quickly gave way to those of anger. 

Taking advantage of their shock and distraction, Loki pulled Thor along, slipping past the giants almost close enough to touch and biting his tongue to keep from reacting to the scalding heat. He took them past the last of the warriors and through the gate, still standing open. 

Gates like these were designed for defense, which meant that from the outside, they were near impenetrable, thick stone that would seal itself into a single piece at a words of command. From the inside, though, it was designed to be shut quickly, all the better to keep out an invading enemy, even one who managed to catch the keep off guard. 

The spell keeping them hidden could be dropped as easily as he raised it and he let it fall now, standing right in the open doorway and waiting to be noticed. It did not take long; a shout let him know they'd been spotted, and a half-second later a small hoard of giants rushed toward them in an enraged frenzy. 

It took hardly any effort to set the gate swinging shut in their face, slamming and grinding to a halt inches in front of the nearest giant's nose. A quick spell of command sealed the stone, thick enough that the shouting and pounding on the other side could barely be heard. 

He watched the door for a few seconds more, braced and waiting to see if it would hold, but the stone did not so much as tremble. 

An uneasy feeling prickled up the back of his neck, and it jolted him out of the momentary elation of a trick well played. “You're staring,” he said, and Thor stiffened. 

“You were smiling,” Thor said. “I didn't think...” He trailed off, but Loki could easily guess where the sentence had been headed. “It's been some time since I last saw you in high spirits,” he said instead. 

Loki rolled his eyes. “There's been little enough reason for high spirits,” he said, “and there will be less if we lose sight of our quest.”

“Right,” Thor said, “Sutur.” His expression turned to an approximation of grave seriousness that might have fooled someone who didn't know him well. A small bounce to his step gave away his excitement, though, and the edges of a grin lurked just beneath the surface of the serious mask. “Let's go find him.” 

Loki himself felt almost as eager as he suspected Thor was, but for different reasons. The heat stifled him in a way that he could not ignore, a constant looming presence he was eager to be rid of even if whatever followed would almost surely be worse. 

He nodded. “Let's.” 

* * *

The process of finding Surtur involved more wandering and less fighting than he had imagined, much to his relief and Thor's obvious disappointment. Muspelheim's chief stronghold proved spacious and sparsely populated, and its inhabitants noisy enough, between heavy giant footfalls and loud conversations, to be noticed from a distance and easily avoided. 

They followed well-traveled walkways on the assumption that Surtur would reside at the heart of his stronghold, and these took them unerringly downward, deeper into the baked stone. 

Calling the passages they walked halls was, perhaps, overly generous. They had the look and feel of a cave, too even to be entirely natural but still too rough to qualify as an architectural work and not merely a tunnel connecting a series of walkways. It reminded him of the tunnels created by colonies of ants, branching and webbing outward into a vast yet barely-organized network of spaces. Searching them all could prove to be a long and frustrating task. 

In the end, they stumbled upon Surtur almost by accident. Loki led the way along a long tunnel, striding forward and hoping fruitlessly that if he moved quickly enough the contrived breeze might take the sharp edge off of the heat, and he nearly stumbled into the room before scrambling back into the hall and waving Thor along behind him. 

They froze in the hall, barely breathing, but the only sound that broke the silence was sharp and regular, ringing out and echoing through the caves once every few seconds. The way his skull vibrated and his teeth rattled in response struck him as familiar, but it took a second place it. 

Nidavellir. He'd heard this before but on a far larger scale, the sound of metal meeting superheated metal on a forge. Now that he thought of it, he could smell the superheated metal in the air, feel the extra heat radiating from the room. 

The spell to hide them both from sight took more out of him than it usually would, the sharp sensation that accompanied the magic bordering right on the edge of pain. He could feel the Eternal Flame attempting to unfurl within the confines of his ribs, the small fist-sized knot of cold within him that even the heat outside couldn't touch creeping tentatively outwards. He kept it in place by pure force of will, casting the spell that half shielded them from view and half made them difficult to notice. Taken together, Surtur would have to search them out to be able to see them, and he had no reason to expect to find them here. 

Once the spell had been fixed in place to his satisfaction, he beckoned Thor to follow him into the room's entryway, where they could get a clear look at Surtur. 

The king of the fire giants stood over a great forge at the far end of the room, holding a piece of metal, shaped roughly like a blade and glowing with heat, in one hand. He raised the other hand and brought it down, hard, and the clang of stone on metal rang through the room. 

The motion repeated, raise, strike, raise, strike, a steady rhythm that absorbed the giant-king's attention to the point where Loki suspected he could drop the spell that shielded them from notice without risking discovery. 

A quick visual search of the room confirmed that they were alone; whatever the king of Muspelheim was doing, he did without any sort of guard or attendant present. 

“Well,” Thor whispered, one hand on his arm to get his attention. “We found Surtur. What is it you wanted us to retrieve?”

“His crown,” Loki whispered back. “It is the source of his strength. Should he find a way to combine it with Asgard's Eternal Flame, it would grant him enough power to bring about Ragnarok.” 

Thor frowned. “Do you know where he's keeping it, or…” 

Loki frowned back. “It's on his head. It's a _crown_ , Thor.” 

“What, that bone thing? I wouldn't call it a crown. More of a,” he waved a hand around lazily, “skull face-thing. With horns.” 

“It is his crown,” Loki snapped, and he barely remembered to keep his voice to a whisper. The heat had him irritable enough without Thor antagonizing him. 

“All I'm saying is that it doesn't look like one. We could call it something else, perhaps.” 

“I don't care what you call it,” he hissed. “I only care that we separate him from it before he has the chance to attempt destruction of our entire realm. If you won't help me…” 

“Of course I will.”

“Then be quiet.” As he watched, Surtur lifted the piece of metal, turning it from side to side with an assessing look. “I need to come up with a plan.” 

They lapsed into silence once more as Loki thought, mentally rifling through various possibilities and discarding them. Technically if he failed he could simply try again, but to do so meant reliving everything he'd accomplished up to this point, the journey, the unbearable heat, Thor's company, everything. The thought sent something lurching in his chest that almost certainly wasn't just the Eternal Flame reminding him of its presence and impatience. 

Surtur finished his assessment of the blade-in-progress, turning it over once more before thrusting the whole thing back into the forge, letting it rest on the white-hot flames. 

“We could do ‘Get Help’,” Thor suggested, and Loki tore his eyes away from watching the giant to give him a scathing look. 

“Are you actually suggesting,” he said in a voice that he hoped clearly communicated how foolish and offensive he found the idea, “that you throw me face-first into a giant with skin the temperature of molten rock? He is quite _literally_ on _fire_ , Thor.” 

“I didn't think—” 

“Clearly,” he said, and took a spiteful amount of pleasure in it. “What, were you expecting that my screams of pain as my skin melted off my flesh could serve as a distraction?” 

“Loki—” 

“No,” he said, “tell me, is the possibility of my being maimed in the course of your little adventure simply not a concern, or are you truly so incapable of thinking through the consequences of your actions that you cannot use your intuition to predict that throwing a Frost Giant into the equivalent of a living bonfire might end badly?”

“ _Loki_ ,” Thor said again, and it had a sharp, reproachful note to it that made him bristle. 

“No,” he said, “don't lecture me when _you_ are the one who—” 

“I think he's noticed us,” Thor said before he could finish. 

“What…” he trailed of, because much as he hated to admit such a thing, Thor was right—Surtur stared between them, looking generally unsure whether he should be angry at their being there or darkly amused at whatever lack of sense had them squabbling like children outside their enemy's stronghold. 

“Oh,” he said at last, and Thor nodded. 

Surtur made up his mind, either because they were no longer squabbling and shouting enough to distract him or because his mind worked slowly enough that this was how long it took it to be made up, and he made it up to be upset with them after all. 

“Odinsons,” he spat, and Loki cringed inwardly at the name. “You are not welcome here.”

“That's hardly surprising,” Thor said. “It's not a very welcoming place. Maybe if you decorated a bit, some tapestries, a rug or two on the floors—” 

Loki elbowed him in the ribs and received a pained huff and a reproachful look in return. 

“I'll hang your corpses from the ceiling,” Surtur said, “as a warning to any other unwelcome intruders who make their way this far into my domain. That will be decoration enough.” 

The sword was in his hand once again, the metal hot enough to glow an unearthly green-yellow. 

The two of them instinctively fell back into a fighting crouch, and he heard rather than saw Thor take a small step away from him. Loki did the same, and in unspoken agreement they edged further apart, separating and circling so that Surtur would have to choose a target and risk leaving himself open to the other in order to strike. 

He went, unsurprisingly, after Thor. Well enough; his brother was the more obvious threat, and it suited Loki just as well to strike from behind. He danced back as unobtrusively as possible as the giant charged, leaving Thor to meet that charge alone. 

Thor could handle himself. After all, he'd supposedly fought Surtur and retrieved the crown alone in another time, and not so much had changed between now and then as to leave him helpless in this fight. 

He succeeded in slipping behind Surtur unnoticed and he moved in, knife at the ready. 

The wave of heat hit him like a solid wall, the air broiling as though he'd pressed his face to the entrance of an oven. He fell back without striking, pulling back from the scorching heat radiating off of their opponent and his sword before he'd made it within a few feet of connecting. He scrambled back a few more steps before he could collect his wits and hold himself steady. 

In front of him, Thor met Surtur's charge, catching a grand sweep of the superheated sword aimed to slice him in half on Mjolnir's immovable head and then using it to push the giant a step back. Thor didn't seem to be having the same trouble with the heat, likely because _he_ was not actually an ice giant beneath his Aesir exterior. 

The move had bought him a bit of time and he used it to start spinning his hammer, preparing for a throw that would send Surtur staggering back. 

Loki made a split-second decision. He could not move closer without risking injury, which meant fighting at a distance, and a thrown dagger would have little hope of penetrating the giant's stone-like skin. An illusion would distract Thor as easily as Surtur, and fire magic, usually a solid tactic, would be worse than worthless against a resident of Muspelheim. 

His hands closed around the Casket of Ancient Winters almost before he'd finished the thought to summon it. 

He almost dropped it. For a second he thought it'd burned him in a way it never had the few times he'd wielded it before, and it took a fraction of a second for him to realize it was simply the change induced by its magic creeping up his arm, exposing frozen Jotun flesh to the already unbearably hot room. He cast the spell quickly before the change could spread, laying down a thin layer of ice across the floor behind the giant's feet before he dropped the Casket back to where he'd pulled it from. 

He expected that Thor's blow would connect, pushing the giant-king back into the ice where he would slip and fall and be easily overpowered. 

What happened instead was that the ice hissed violently as it coated the hot ground, sending cracks shuddering through the stone as it evaporated near-instantly into a heavy fog that coated the ground. 

He barely managed to dodge as Surtur flew past him, vanishing into the newly-arisen fog, and a second later Thor was running up beside him. “Was this you?” he asked, gesturing to the heavy mist that surrounded them. 

Loki's hands still stung, even shifted back to their familiar Aesir skin, and small blisters had risen up on the skin that hadn't been in direct contact with the Casket. He nodded. “He won't be able to see us,” he said rather than admitting it hadn't been intentional.

“True.” Thor hummed. “But we can't see him, either.” 

Deep within the fog, a spot high above their heads began to glow. Bright orange light diffused through the fog, creating a hazy outline like a lit candle seen through frosted glass. 

“I wouldn't be too sure of that,” Loki said, and Thor lifted his hammer, taking aim at the glowing silhouette.

Loki reached out and put a hand on Thor's arm without taking his eyes off the approaching giant. “Wait,” he said, and Thor did. No hesitation while he wondered if he could trust his brother, no second-guessing or questions that would waste valuable time, only a pause as he wound up for the throw, stopping to wait and see what Loki intended. Surtur, in front of them, took another thunderous step forward. With each step his features sharpened a big more, growing slowly but surely ever more visible in the gloom. 

If Surtur could see clearly, it likely wouldn't work, but with the heavy fog he doubted the giant had a clear view of his own feet. 

Loki knelt down and, against his own better judgement, rested his fingertips in the stone. It burned uncomfortably warm. Already, he could feel the skin blistering, stinging and tight. 

He let a bit of magic seep into the ground, running along and stretching into a thin line separating them from Surtur. A half-second later he stood abruptly, jerking upright and clenching his hands into fists as he rose. 

The thin, taut line of magic rose with him, drawing up the stone with it. A projection a few feet high shot out of the ground with a sharp sound, forming a short stone wall right in front of Surtur's feet. 

Just as Loki had expected, if the giant saw the rising stone he recognized it too late to react. One foot caught on the stone outcropping. Surtur toppled slowly, arms waving as he tried and failed to regain his balance. The flaming superheated sword jarred from his hand as he hit the ground and it skittered in their direction. Loki took an unconscious step back. 

The ground beneath them shuddered as Surtur toppled, and the giant hit the ground already scrambling to rise. Too late; Thor surged forward to take advantage of the opening, brandishing his hammer and skimming the ground in a way that was almost flying. The bloodthirsty grin Thor had been badly suppressing during this entire quest had broken free, and a wild, triumphant light gleamed behind his eyes. 

The one advantage Surtur had held had been his height; brought down to Thor's level, he didn't stand a chance. 

Loki hung back. If Thor needed his help he would've pushed himself to power through proximity to the flames, but it was clear Thor needed help from no one. He watched with a sort of sick fascination as Thor pummeled the giant, knocking him back down every time he tried to rise, not allowing him to regain his footing. 

Thor giant-killer, he'd been called more than once before. It was a title he'd thought too much of during Thor's banishment, in the time just after he'd learned why he should have reason to fear it, and it was a title he did his best to push from his mind now, as he watched it put to action. After all, he was not Surtur, and he and Thor, at least for now, were battling on the same side. 

After a few more swings of Mjolnir, Surtur stopped trying to rise, and Thor set cheerfully to work at prying the crown loose from his slumped form. The process involved several burnt fingers, if the way he initially jerked them back and swore was anything to go by, but he eventually managed by wrapping his cape around his hands like a set of makeshift oven mitts and using it to pry the crown loose. A second later he seemed to remember Loki, and he held the crown up for him to see, smiling triumphantly. 

“I have it!” he shouted needlessly, and Loki bit back a sarcastic reply as Thor trotted over. He held his trophy out with both hands, turning it back and forth as though to inspect it. “It doesn't look especially dangerous,” he said. 

“Believe me,” Loki said, “it is an artifact more dangerous than half the things in Odin's vaults, and more malicious than the other half.”

Thor shrugged. He unwound his cape from where it was wrapped haphazardly around the body of the crown, and after a couple of minutes and some fiddling with straps, he had put together a makeshift sling and settled the thing on his back. The tips of the ridiculously long horns peeked out from over his shoulders, spreading from them like short, ineffectual wings. 

“It will soon join them, in any case.” 

Abruptly, Thor went stiff; beside him, Loki did the same. A distant but approaching sound of giant footsteps came from one of the halls leading off this room, and they exchanged a silent look. It would not do to be found standing over their fallen king, not unless they intended to start another fight. 

By unspoken agreement they took off at a sprint. Hot air rushed past Loki's face as they flew down the hall, too warm for the slight breeze created by their movement to be any sort of relief. His boots slid just a little on the slick volcanic rock, not quite enough to trip him. The hallways, built for giants, stayed wide enough for them to run side-by-side without fear of crashing together and collapsing in a tangled heap. 

For a moment, the only sound was their footsteps, his and Thor's breathing, fast and just a bit labored from the exertion, and the gentle thump as the crown rose and fell against Thor's shoulders with each running step. An instant later and a shout arose from behind them; the aftereffects of their visit being discovered. 

They put on a burst of speed and turned a corner just in time to nearly run face-first into a small party of what looked like sentries. He dodged to one side and Thor to the other as they split around them and kept running, letting the delay from the confusion of their passing buy them a head start. 

They kept to a sprint, and Loki's lungs strained against the hot air brought in by his deep, ragged breaths. It was a thousand times worse than training in the sun in the Asgardian summers had been, and in his head he grudgingly admitted that the old quartermaster who had insisted on it so that they'd learn to acclimate to the heat may have had a point. 

Then, at last, they were barreling towards the entryway door he'd sealed, and he just managed to gasp the spell to lift the enchantment keeping it closed before they were right on top of and then through it. The trapped guards had, evidently, eventually given up battering in the unmoving stone and sat down against a far wall; by the time they made it back to their feet the two brothers were already past and breaking the surface of the fiery realm. 

They continued a little way further, just far enough to be sure that no one had followed, and then slowed to a stumbling stop and stood, breathing in loud, gasping breaths. Loki nearly fell forward and braced himself with his hands on his knees, focusing on bringing his breathing back under control. In and out, a careful rhythm, slow and deep. 

He looked up to find Thor doing the same, and a wide grin spread across his brother's face, familiar from their long history of shared mischief. A matching one stretched across his face, and not even the way it pulled at his split lip ruined the moment. An old, familiar feeling twinges in his chest, something nostalgic.

The feeling was warm, in a way separate from the heat around them, and familiar, like they'd returned to earlier times when they'd adventure together and counted on each other so simply their loyalties could be taken for granted. Like Thanos wasn't coming, had never come, and they had an eternity to spend at each other's sides. 

A lie, but a beguiling one. Almost enough to make him wish he wasn't too skilled in recognizing falsehoods to enjoy it. 

Thor dropped a hand on his shoulder, heavy and solid and almost too warm. “Come, brother,” he said, “it's time we return home.” 

The illusion shattered, sudden as a missed step. Asgard would not, could not be his home, and if there was something nostalgic about how little this Thor had changed, nostalgia was not a strong enough thread to mend the way the status quo had always torn him apart. 

He forced his face to remain unreadable, a blank mask. “Yes,” he said, “so it is.” 

Thor stepped forward and raised his head as if to call Heimdall, then stopped. “The Bifrost is not yet repaired,” he said. “You'll have to bring us back.” 

Loki rested a hand on Thor's shoulder, the space not taken up by the huge crown of bone slung across his back. He closed his eyes and pulled them to the edge of the bridge. 

The way the cracked crystal sang under their feet drew his stomach down into a deep pit below his ribs, a phantom memory of the moments before his fall that still lingered. The edge of their world generated no wind, and the air stood eerily calm as ever, cool and damp in a sharp contrast to the dry heat of Muspelheim. 

Loki stood well back, for now, but forced himself to look over the edge.

The passage to the Void remained like an old scar, torn into the sky below at the breaking of the Bifrost and barely mended. His heart caught in his throat as he looked at it, but he swallowed it down. 

It would take barely a flicker of magic to tear it back open, just a drop at the right time. He knew, now, where that portal led. 

“Thor,” he said, tearing his eyes away. “Give me the crown.” 

He met his brother's eyes, but Thor glared at him suspiciously. “Why?” 

He scowled, pushing his impatience into his voice. “Just give it to me, Thor.” 

He looked wary, more like a hunted animal than Loki would have thought possible for the Thor of this time. “You said we needed to bring it to the Vault. I can carry it there.” 

“There's something I need to do first.”

“Tell me what.” Thor crossed his arms, and he sighed. 

“Just—please.” Every ounce of his acting ability, of his ability to _lie_ , he poured into those words. He begged, pleaded, sacrificed his dignity as he appealed to every part of Thor's instincts that were _older brother_ to trust him, or at least humor him. 

Thor scowled, then wavered, then scowled harder. Slowly, reluctantly, he unslung the crown from his back and held it out. 

“Don't make me regret this,” he said, and Loki took the crown and then a careful step back, clutching it to his chest. The Eternal Flame burned against his skin from the inside, reaching for the artifact that would complete its purpose. 

He looked Thor straight in the eyes, clear and sharp with worry, and allowed himself to hold the contact for a second longer than he probably should before taking another step back. 

“I'm sorry,” he said, and the confusion dawned to terrified comprehension in Thor's eyes as he pushed backwards and let himself fall, once more, toward the channel of emptiness that led to Thanos. 

Thor's scream followed him down, ringing in his ears long after all had faded to silence. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This chapter is fairly short but I feel like I should say that it's one of the darkest and most graphically violent yet, so fair warning. Things will get better from here on out I swear.
> 
> Thanks, as usual, to worstloki for tons of incredible editing help!
> 
> And thank you to everyone reading who made it this far! I appreciate you all. ❤️

Falling this time was different than the first. 

Then, he'd been only himself. Soft, untouched by all but childhood adventures that, if not tame, seemed so by comparison to what had come next. 

He'd thought, then, it would be the end. Naught after but cold and silence, the eternal sleep of those fated for nothingness and destruction. The pain had been a surprise, the fabric of the Void tearing at his consciousness and denying him rest even as he'd slowly, too slowly, surrendered to death. 

This was better and worse. The pain wrapped him like an old, familiar blanket, at once more hateful and more bearable for its familiarity. He had grown, perhaps, not stronger but more brittle, with weaker frayed edges and a cast-iron core, leaving the heart of him...not quite vulnerable, but exposed. 

But more importantly, perhaps, the fire of the Eternal Flame burned within the prison of his ribs, unspeakably cold, and it sustained him. Now he did not grow closer to death, because he could come no closer than carrying it within him. It kept him, too, agonizingly awake, agonizingly conscious, aware of each crystalline second that passed as he fell and fell and fell. 

This time, he felt the jar as he hit the ground, his body splayed across the stone of Sanctuary. He held to consciousness, the Eternal Flame burning like ice water in his veins, and pushed to his feet. 

It did not take long for the servants of Thanos to find him, and he allowed himself to be half-led, half-dragged, and pushed to his knees at the foot of the titan's makeshift throne. The Eternal Flame lapped against his mind like waves at a shore, calming him, keeping him cold enough to calculate but urging him towards a particular conclusion. 

Unleashing Surtur here, in this confined space, so close to himself, that would be a death sentence. 

It would also be a price worth paying. 

He took a moment to regret the cruelty to Thor. Thanos would die and the loop end, and Loki would find his end as well. The last memory Thor would have of him would be watching him fall, purposely and again, helpless as his worst memory up until that point repeated itself. He would never choose that for his brother, except that he had, and Thor, if he knew the true stakes, would thank him for it. 

Or perhaps not, but he _should_. 

“I bring you an offering,” he said through dry, cracked lips. Thanos chuckled. 

“It will take quite an offering to save you now, little prince.” Thanos' eyes were hard, unforgiving. 

“Oh, don't worry,” he said, reflexively imitating a confidence lent strength by the calm that settled deep within him at his decision. “It will impress.” 

He reached into the space between, the dimensional pocket where it was stowed, and drew forth the crown of Surtur. He pitched it forward, nearly overbalancing in the process, and let it clatter to the floor. 

Thanos stared down at it, unimpressed. 

“A worthless bit of bone.” Thanos nudged it with his foot. “I hope this is not—” 

Loki reached deep within himself and drew out the Eternal Flame, shoving it with his magic from where it pooled in his lungs and out into the crown. It sparked and caught; the fire danced across the bone, painting it in shades of orange and blue and green. 

It smouldered, for a second, and the entire room held their breath. Thanos opened his mouth to say something more when the flame erupted skyward, dancing higher and higher before coalescing into the rough beginnings of the shape that had haunted his fourth-worst nightmares. 

Stripped of the Eternal Flame, Loki's ribs ached, and he barely had the energy to push himself back up onto his hands and knees before the flames shot outward and crawled across his flesh. It was pain worse than anything he'd experienced, at Thanos' hands or after, a fire that burned his very core and boiled his soul within him. His skin scorched and split across his hands and face, and his tears of agony turned to steam on his cheeks. 

Thanos shouted as the Sanctuary went up in flames, and the stone throne on which he had been sitting bubbled and hissed. Loki managed to drag himself a little ways away before his arms collapsed underneath him, and he lay baking on the hot stone, listening to the sound of clashing metal and shouts. 

They rose and ebbed and fell as he floated, connected to his body only by the thinnest sense of obligation. He'd ceased to feel his hands and the lower parts of his arms at all, but that was a small mercy when the rest of his body felt amplified, agonized, screaming not only pain but a sense of irreversible _wrongness_. There would be no healing from this. Every breath scorched his lungs. 

The sounds of the battle might have fallen off all at once, or perhaps he'd drifted out of focus, but he came to himself to the sound of a single set of giant footsteps. _It's over_ , he told himself, and would have laughed if his lungs hadn't been full of steam. _Finally_.

“That was a trick, little prince.” Thanos' voice above him made him stiffen, and he whimpered. “I don't know why I expected better.”

A boot kicked him over onto his back, and then he was looking up at Thanos, looming over both Loki and the discarded remains of Surtur, now little more than a pile of charcoal and his cursed crown.

Perhaps he had less power here on Sanctuary than on Asgard, wretched airless asteroid that it was, or perhaps the small portion of flame he'd brought hadn't been sufficient.

Or maybe it was only the way he seemed destined to fail, time and time again. 

Burns stretched over one side of the Titan's body, his face, cracking the skin like the surface of a parched desert and leaving it slightly blackened at the edges. Thanos moved tightly, as though he were in pain, but with the same sense of menace he'd possessed before the fight. 

“You will regret that,” he said, and knelt down, pressing his fingers to the burns on Loki's chest. “But not, I think, for very long.” 

Loki squirmed, because he didn't have the strength to struggle, and pushed his words from before through his ruined throat. That, he thought, had been a better death, however horrible. Frost Giants were not meant for fire. “You...never...be a god,” he wheezed, and Thanos frowned. 

“Something's changed,” he said, and dug his fingers deeper into cracked, charred flesh. “Since the last time I saw you.” Loki screamed. “Last time, you feared me, and what I could do to you. Sensible. But shortsighted.” 

The pain made Loki's consciousness blur as he was lifted, dragged roughly to his feet by a harsh grip on his burnt arm. “Now, though, you fear something else. You fear what I will _do_. The fulfillment of my ultimate plan.” The grip shifted to his jaw, too close to his throat, and the Titan lifted him to eye level. “All this to stop me. So much pain you've brought on yourself.” He ran a contemplative finger across the skin of his burnt arm before he grabbed one of his hands and _squeezed_ , listened thoughtfully to Loki's shriek of pain. “You've seen it,” he said, with more certainty than he should have been able to possess. “Can you see the future, little prince?” Hateful eyes, gleaming with malice and satisfaction, studied his own. “No,” he decided finally. “The past, then.” Loki flinched, and a predatory smile spread across the Titan's face. “Yes. You've come back, to try and stop me. How many times?” 

He squeezed, the pressure mounting until Loki was sure his jaw would snap, the bone splinter into an unusable mess and skewer his tongue on its shards. “More...” he managed at last, and the pressure abated. “More than I can count.” 

The words were rasping, weak; they tasted like ash on his tongue. 

“Yes,” Thanos said again. His eyes blazed. He dropped Loki, let him fall into a gasping pile onto the charred floor that still glowed with the embers of Surtur's fires. He felt more liquid than solid, alight with pain like magma running across the stone floor. The titan raised his sword, and for once, Loki thought he might understand why his children called death a mercy. 

“I am _inevitable_ ,” he said, and the sword fell. 

“Please put down the spear,” Fury said. 

Loki fell to his knees. 

Tears ran down his cheeks, unheeded. His whole body shook. 

“There is no escape,” he heard himself say. “He's coming. He's coming.” 

The world spun and faded out, not to black but to a staticky, snowy white. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading everyone's predictions after the last chapter was utterly _delightful_ , a huge thank you to everyone who made my day by sharing your thoughts! Some of the guesses were shockingly spot-on, too; if I didn't know better I'd think people were reading my mind. :)
> 
> A huge thank you as always to worstloki for ideas and editing help!

When Loki came to himself, it was in a small, well-lit room, to the sound of distant shouting. The first thing he registered was that there were hands on him, shaking him, and he shuddered at the contact. He was slumped with his back to a wall, hunched in on himself as if to ward off a cold that didn't physically exist. The mortal above him was making sounds, stringing together words, but their meaning didn't pierce through the fog in his head. 

The second thing he noticed was that Thanos' presence in his mind was gone. But how—he grappled at that, trying to find a cause to fit the effect. No blows to the head, this time, and shouldn't that mean it was still there? But no, he was sure and it was gone. 

Perhaps the edges of his mind had slipped, been worn away, and there was nothing left to anchor the spell? Or perhaps—perhaps it was a recoil from the pain, and Thanos' grip had pulled back from the memories of agony and searing despair like fingers releasing a hot coal. 

Either way, it mattered little. He'd gladly take a fall off a building over...this.

The third thing that broke through the haze was a commotion at the door, a fight, a mortal flying across the room and bouncing off a blank wall like a tossed doll. People shouted and they ran and then Thor was standing over him, a presence he'd recognize even if his brain was twice as clouded as it was now. 

“What is happening? What did you do to him?” Thor demanded, and while some of the mortals raised their weapons, another—no, Fury—waved them back and faced Thor head-on. They kept their weapons trained on him, but from a distance, and Thor paid them no mind. 

“We didn't do anything,” Fury said, sharply but levelly. “He showed up out of nowhere repeating some ominous nonsense and took something that belongs to us. If you can get him to give it back, we can all sit down for a nice long talk about this habit of showing up on our planet unannounced. And who's coming, and why.” 

Thor ignored him. His face was closer, now, enough that he'd most likely gotten down on his knees. “Loki?” he asked cautiously. “Brother, are you all right?” 

Loki squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “He's coming,” he managed. “You cannot stop him. He cannot be stopped. He will come and bring ruin and slaughter in his wake. Midgard,” he said, “Asgard,” because he remembered the Black Order slaughtering their people on the Statesman, had seen too much before he'd met his end to believe that Asgard herself would not fall. “It cannot be stopped.” 

“Shh,” Thor said, the sound more frantic than comforting. 

His ears were buzzing, the world was humming, everything moving in slow motion but still too fast for his brain to keep up. He had just enough lucidity to realize that this was irrational, that he needed to calm down, but not quite enough to make it happen. 

Thor's hand touched his face, and for a second he was back, dangling helpless in Thanos' grip. “No,” he pleaded, “no, please, just let me die, just let me...” He trailed off into a sob. 

And then it cleared, and it was Thor above him again, outlined against the ceiling of the mortal compound. Pulling back, a stricken look on his face. 

“I think...” he tried, and when the words died on his tongue, he tried again. “I think I need to lie down for a bit. Clear my head.”

“We've got a nice detainment cell that's currently empty,” Fury suggested. “I think we'd all feel better if you two took some time to cool down in containment.” 

Thor looked ready to object, but when Loki nodded he bit his lip. “Okay,” he said, “but only until my brother is rested. And,” he added, “I think it only right to inform you that we are princes of our realm, and whatever treatment is extended to us will not be forgotten by the House of Odin.” 

Fury nodded, but that, at least, made him look a bit uneasy. “Duly noted.” 

Thor helped him to his feet, and he leaned heavily on his brother as they silently trailed after the soldier who showed them to their cell. Normally Loki might object to that, on principle, but for right now he very much wanted to collapse and not think about the world, and in any case, it was unlikely that the room was anything he and Thor together could not force their way out of. 

The bed was low and small, little more than a cot pressed against one wall, but he dropped down heavily and curled up on top of it. He was vaguely aware that Thor was speaking, probably to him, but the words blurred and ran like rain on a chalk drawing, and he drifted near-instantly into a deep, exhausted sleep. 

* * *

Loki woke to fingers combing through his hair. When he opened his eyes, staring blankly at the wall ahead of him, they stilled, and he could feel the eyes on him without turning. 

“Loki?” Thor asked cautiously. “Are you still...” 

“Mad?” Loki laughed, a small, dark, humorless sound that came out more pathetic than he would have liked. “Probably, but I am at least more coherent now.” 

Thor sighed. “Thank the Norns.” 

Loki rolled over and pushed himself up, sitting cross-legged on the bed with his back to the wall where he could see the rest of the room. Thor had dragged a short chair over beside the bed, presumably so he could sit and awkwardly watch as Loki slept, a situation he did not wish to think any more deeply about. The remainder of the room was dull and unremarkable, but fortunately not bright enough to draw him back to his time in his cell beneath Asgard. 

“Loki,” Thor said, because his brother couldn't give him even a moment to readjust without pestering him. “What is happening? Who's coming?” 

Something in him lurched at the thought of saying the name. For all he'd done, all he'd been through, he'd only told his brother of the Titan once. Once, when Thor had looked at him with one worried eye and asked _Loki, whose ship is that?_ as his heart pounded in his throat, the too-fast rhythm of terror. 

But he had nothing to lose, at this point. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing that mattered and no way out. “Thanos,” he said, and closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall. “Thanos is coming.” 

“What? Loki,” Thor said, so urgently that he opened his eyes again. “How do you know this?” 

“How do you think?” His voice cracked, and he would be embarrassed if he could feel anything other than a hazy unrest. 

“You—he—did he—” Thor stopped, took a moment to collect himself before continuing. “He held you. Against your will,” he said at last, a statement and not a question, touched by the edges of anger. 

Loki almost laughed. “He did far more than that. No, don't look like that,” he said, as Thor clenched his fists and his jaw and looked half-ready to punch a hole in the wall of their containment cell. “There isn't a point.”

“I'll kill him,” Thor said, and the sound that followed might have been thunder rumbling in the distance. 

“No, you won't.” He let himself sigh, defeated. “You'll try, perhaps, but it will not work. Nothing will work. Nothing ever works.” 

“Do not tell me what I cannot do,” Thor snapped, but a second later he apparently remembered he was speaking to his brother, fragile, half-mad, and lowered his voice. “I cannot allow this to stand. I will not.” 

“Touching,” Loki said. “Useless, but touching. I am telling you, Thor, that there is no future where you succeed, or we succeed, or anyone succeeds. He is...” Loki took a deep, shuddering breath, and said in a small voice, “inevitable. I cannot stop him. I can't.” 

“Loki,” Thor said, more carefully than Loki had ever heard him say anything,“what are you saying?”

“I've tried,” he said, babbling now through an embarrassingly steady stream of tears. “I've tried and we've tried and nothing works, he always wins and then he destroys it all and there's no way to stop him. It's a fixed outcome, an eternal loop. The World Serpent biting its own tail. You cannot stop him any more than you could halt fate.”

Thor looked at him, frowning as though trying to piece together whatever bits of coherent speech he could pick out of Loki's rambling stream of words. “You've lived this before.” 

Loki nodded miserably. 

“How?” 

“The Time Stone,” he said, swiping viciously at his eyes. “One of the six. A sorceress of Midgard cast a spell with it, and every time he succeeds in invading this world things...start over.”

“How many times?” The words made something inside of him flinch back, the symmetry, but this time they weren't delivered with the mad titan's cruel satisfaction. Thor's words were gentle, and in a way that broke him more than any amount of cruelty could. 

“I don't know,” he said. “Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe more.”

“Oh, Loki,” Thor said, and tears rose up in his eyes. 

“No!” He snapped the word, loud enough that they both flinched, and pulled back when Thor reached for him. “Don't you dare. Don't you pity me, Thor Odinson. I don't need your pity.”

The click of the door opening interrupted whatever Thor intended to say next, and the mortal standing in the doorway—Barton—cleared his throat. Both of them stiffened, and Loki wiped his eyes with the inside of his sleeve. 

“Now is not a good time,” Thor said firmly, and the archer shrugged. 

“Look, I'm just the messenger. The boss knows you're both awake, and he wants to talk to you.” Thor glared, and he pushed off the doorframe. “I'll give you a minute,” Barton said, “but after that I can't promise anything.” He shut the door behind him, and Thor turned his attention back to Loki. 

“I don't know what else to do,” he said miserably, taking deep breaths to pull himself back under control. The mortals had already seen him break down, but there was no point in appearing any weaker than he must already. “What else to try.” 

“We'll come up with something,” Thor said, then chuckled bitterly to himself. “I'm sorry. I can't imagine how many thousands of times you must have heard that already.” 

He didn't say it— _Actually, that's a first—_ but something in his expression must have given it away anyways. Thor gave him an unreadable look, one the Thor of this time had no right to be using. “Loki, is this—is this the first time you've asked for help? Truly?” 

“No,” He sputtered. “Of course not. I've sought out the aid of many. You, and Asgard, and the mortals, and powers of which you have no knowledge.” 

Thor hummed. “I've no doubt you recruited many an ally,” he said. “But did you ever stop and ask for help, with the problem or your plans, or were we all just moving pieces in your schemes?”

His stunned silence must have been answer enough. 

“You stubborn fool,” Thor said, but the words were almost fond. “You never even considered it, did you?” 

Loki looked down at his hands, scrubbed a thumbnail viciously over the opposite palm. “We should go see what the mortals want,” he said, and Thor sighed. 

“You aren't in this alone,” he said, and while he no doubt meant it, it struck a nerve. 

“Really? Because I don't remember you or anyone else there with me when I died alone a scant few hours ago, when the last of my attempts failed,” he shot back. 

Thor flinched, and went silent. Whatever dark satisfaction he derived from that was swallowed in guilt at the pained look on his brother's face. 

_Not that it mattered. Not that he'd remember_. He pushed the feeling down and pushed himself up, moving confidently to the door and letting Thor trail behind him. 

The guard on the other side led them to a small room set up with a table and a few chairs, a lamp, covered windows. A makeshift interrogation room, with Fury and several of his agents waiting inside. “I see you're both awake,” he said, and the other agents regarded them silently. “Please. Sit.”

“I assume you heard everything,” Loki said, forcefully strangling the embarrassment that tried to bubble up at the thought. 

Thor looked surprised, but Fury nodded. “The story you've told us so far, if indirectly, seems a bit...farfetched,” he said. 

“What are you implying?” Loki winced, a little, at the open hostility in Thor's tone, even if a small part of him appreciated having his brother jump so quick to his defense. Only a small part, because he hadn't forgotten that in other circumstances, past or future or however that worked, Thor had been every bit as eager to accuse him of dishonesty. 

“I'm implying that I'd like to have more to go on here than your word, especially if I'm supposed to be buying a story full of aliens and time travel,” Fury said, keeping his voice admirably level. 

“My brother does not need to prove himself to you.” 

“Nor,” Loki said, ignoring the surprised look Thor gave him as he spoke up, “do I expect that we could easily prove any of this to your satisfaction.” 

“Try me.”

He looked deep into Fury's single eye. Suspicious. Hostile. Intelligent. The man didn't bend easily, and he was near-impossible to break. 

“A long time ago,” Loki said, “I asked you to tell me something that only you would know. Something that I could use to convince you in the future that I am telling the truth.” He took a deep breath. “You told me you lost your eye to a goose.” 

A ghost of a smile crossed his face at that, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. “And how do I know you're not some kind of mind reader,” he said. “You could've pulled that right out of my thoughts. You've done other sorts of strange stuff, makes me think I don't know what you're capable of and I definitely don't know what you're up to.” 

Loki huffed a small tired laugh, at the irony if nothing else. “Would it help my case to say that it is very like you to come to that conclusion?”

Fury returned a flat, unimpressed stare. “I think you know the answer to that.” 

“I suppose I do.” He took a deep breath. “I expect any other information I provide would be regarded with the same suspicion.”

“So it seems we're at an impasse.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and steepling his fingers. “Although...” 

Loki refused to ask, and Thor had the sense to do the same, and so Fury frowned in annoyance before choosing to continue anyway. “We have a saying here on Earth: ‘actions speak louder than words’. If you want us to trust you,” he continued, “returning that cube you stole would be a good start.” 

Thor broke the near-steady glare he had turned on Fury to give Loki a quizzical look; he shook his head slightly. Loki didn't actually remember taking the Tesseract, but then, he'd done it so many times it must have been automatic. He cast into the pocket in space where he stored everything too large or precious to trust to physical pockets and sure enough, he could feel it, its presence almost reassuring when he reached for it. 

“I'm afraid not,” he said. “Your meddling with the Tesseract has already drawn the attention of one of the most dangerous tyrants in the universe; letting you continue to poke at it hardly seems like a good idea.” Thor's eyes went a little wider at that, and Loki was impressed that he managed to hold his silence. 

Fury looked entirely unimpressed with them both. “Seems to me the only thing that's come after the Tesseract so far is you two,” he said. “But say I believe you. A little bit ago, during your earlier meltdown, you kept saying the same thing over and over: ‘he's coming’. Who's coming?” 

Loki bit down on the name. He wasn't sure he could say it a second time, not so soon, but when it became apparent he would not answer, Thor spoke for him. “Thanos,” he said. “The Mad Titan.” 

“Is that supposed to mean something to me? Or...” 

“Just as we are a part of your history that has faded to myth, Thanos is a part of our own half-forgotten history,” Thor said. “He was a warlord, long ago, a conqueror who razed the worlds he defeated rather than ruling them. He would slaughter half the population at random once he had them subdued; no one was certain why. Some believed he had fallen in love with Death herself and meant to send her tribute.” 

Thor gave him a curious look, as though waiting for him to confirm this piece of speculation. He shook his head. “Balance,” he said. “He seeks to balance out the worlds he takes, culling their populations so that their needs do not outstrip their resources. He is insane.”

When he said nothing further, Thor picked up the burden of explanation once again. “Our history tells that our grandfather, Bor, banished Thanos to the furthest reaches of the void,” Thor said. “But the Tesseract—were someone to use it, it would have the power to bring him back here.” 

Silence fell over their little group at this proclamation. Loki found himself feeling tired again; he'd woken less than half an hour ago, but still a part of him wished Thor had not come. Were it not for his brother, he would simply disappear and find a corner of the world to curl up in and sleep off the rest of his exhaustion and failure. Even so, the idea tempted him. 

“That's quite the story,” Fury said at last. “You'll forgive me if I want to independently verify that information.” 

“We are men of honor,” Thor said irritably, but Loki waved him down and he reluctantly fell silent. 

“How do you plan to do that?” he asked instead. “Midgard has yet to escape the confines of this one chunk of rock, and the other races of the Nine are prohibited from traveling here for your own protection.” 

“I have my sources.” The man smiled, a little, at that; it was the first crack in his mask of stern indifference. “I've already called in backup on this matter. You two are staying here until she arrives.” 

“We do not take orders from you,” Thor said, and stood as though to leave. 

“Maybe not, but your brother is curious.” He gestured to Loki, who frowned. “You leave, you don't get to meet my contact.” 

“Perhaps we'd rather not,” Thor said, but he looked torn. “Besides, if anyone of note had come to Midgard within your lifetime, Heimdall would have seen and told us.”

“And who is Heimdall?” 

It was a blatant stalling tactic, transparently designed to keep them here, but Thor was agitated enough to take the bait without realizing. Loki was debating whether to tell Thor or let it happen so he could meet this mysterious contact of Fury's when an agent he remembered as Hill poked her head through the door. 

“Director Fury,” she said, cutting off Thor's impassioned if ill-advised description of Asgard's watchman and his capabilities with an impressive amount of boldness for a mortal, “Someone's here to see you. Says her name is Captain Danvers.” 

“Send her in,” Fury said immediately. Which was just as well, as the blond woman who pushed through the door didn't seem like she'd have waited had the invitation been withheld. 

“So what's up?” she asked without preamble. “Your message said there was an emergency?”

Fury moved a short ways away from the two of them. If the motion was meant to keep the two of them from overhearing, it reflected an almost insulting underestimating of Asgardian hearing. 

“Carol,” he said in a voice that could almost be described as warm. “Glad you could come.” 

“Yeah, well, it sounded like you needed my help,” she said back. “So, what's going on?”

Fury lowered his voice. “The Tesseract has been stolen,” he said, and the woman went still. 

“By who?” 

He nodded back towards where they were sitting. “Guy dressed in green.” 

She frowned and looked over his shoulder at Loki. “That guy? He's right there. He's not even running. Just take it back.”

“That's what I need you for.” 

She sighed and rolled her eyes, but turned her full attention on the two of them. Fury, for his part, leaned back like he was getting ready to watch a show. 

“Hey.” She jogged over, completely relaxed in their presence in a way that unnerved him. She moved with the easy grace of a predator, the loose-limbed gait of one too secure in their strength to truly know fear. It reminded him of Thor, the young, arrogant Thor from before his time as a mortal, and made him wonder what hid behind the mortal guise. Not human, certainly. “My friend tells me you took the Tesseract?” 

He had a sense lying would do him little good, so he nodded. “I did.” 

“Wanna tell me why?” Still the same loose-limbed stance and flat, assessing gaze, and it made him want to edge backwards. 

“Not particularly.” He quirked a dangerous grin, and she returned it. “But what I want has little to do with it, I assume. I need it to kill a tyrant.” 

“You did take it for murder reasons, then.” She kept the same grin, full of false friendliness and real amusement. “How do I know this guy you plan to kill is someone who has it coming?” 

He smiled right back; this question had an easy enough answer, even if he would have to force himself to say it. “His name is Thanos, and his goal is the slaughter of countless innocents. Half the universe, actually, and he's been working his way across the cosmos enacting it planet by planet.”

Her gaze, if it was possible, had gone even flatter than before, but the calm had given way to a sharp tension in her shoulders and spine. If anything, it made her seem more dangerous than before, but it still reassured him, somehow. It was only fair that he not be the only one on edge. 

“So I'd say,” he finished carefully, “that killing him would be doing the universe a favor.”

“A couple years after we established the new Skrull colony,” she said, “one of our trading partners went dark. Agreed-upon shipments stopped coming, communication stopped, and our own ships in transit went missing.” She took a few aimless steps, staring not at him but through him. He knew what it looked like when someone looked past the present to face an ugly past. “It was a long time before we had a chance to make the trip and check it out. Months, maybe a little over a year. There were bodies,” she said. “Piled in the streets, fallen all over one another with burns from blasters covering their backs. Others, newer, looked like they had starved in the aftermath, or killed each other over what was left. We didn't find a single living soul. Eventually, we stopped looking.” She took a deep breath, and it was impressively steady. “Think it could've been your guy?” 

“It sounds like him,” he said, fighting the way his stomach turned. “What was the planet?” 

“Zen-Whoberi.” 

Loki nodded. “That's him. He sometimes took people as trophies, added them to his retinue. There was a Zehoberei woman among his generals.”

Her chin tilted upwards, defiant. “I think I'd like a piece of this guy,” she said. 

She didn't say she wanted to keep an eye on them, to make sure he was sincere and that Thanos was who and what he claimed, but he was sure she intended it nonetheless. 

At this point, he wouldn't have complained if Odin himself had invited himself along. Every new ally changed the equation, and the only plans not worth entertaining were ones he'd already tried. 

“So wait,” Fury said from somewhere behind them. “Does that mean you aren't going to take the Tesseract back?” 

“It belongs to our father,” Thor said. “It was merely left on this planet for safekeeping.” 

“Your father,” Loki mumbled, and Thor looked hurt. 

“Yeah, well, here we tend to regard the things people leave on Earth as belonging to us,” Fury said. 

“Finders-keepers? I was unaware we were resorting to schoolyard arguments.” That earned a snort of amusement from Danvers and a look of confusion from Thor. Stark and his idiosyncratic Earth slang; who knew it'd come in handy? 

“Regardless, we know nothing about these people beyond who they _say_ they are,” Fury said. “And we have nothing except their word that it won't be used as a weapon against Earth.”

“If we wanted to see the Tesseract used against Earth,” Loki shot back, “we would need only to leave it in the hands of your organization. After all, I doubt the Hydra agents embedded in your ranks have altruistic plans for those weapons you've been building.” Fury rocked back like he'd been slapped. “Yes, I've gathered some interesting insight into the inner workings of SHIELD. Their goals and loyalties are somewhat different than those they present.” 

“Who,” Fury said flatly. 

“Garret. Sitwell. Pierce.” The names came easily enough; he'd plucked them from the mind of a lower-level operative with the Mind Stone and committed them to memory in case they proved useful. Fury's flinch was satisfying. “Others. More than you would expect.”

“Yeah, well, I've gathered some information of my own,” he said. “According to mythology, you're the god of lies, and you're going to destroy the whole world. Why should we believe anything you say with that sort of reputation?” 

Loki grinned. “Those stories also say I gave birth to an eight-legged horse and a snake large enough to circle your globe. I'd put forth that perhaps they aren't the most accurate source of information.” 

“Boys.” Danvers shouldered her way between them, looking for all the world like she found the argument mildly entertaining. “Not to spoil the fun, but you got any plans for taking this guy out, or was it just call me?” 

“I doubt you'd meet much success facing him alone,” Loki said, and he half-expected her to argue. Thor would have, or at least, Thor for most of their history, taking any doubt concerning his ability to take on an impossible task as a personal slight. 

Danvers, though, only tilted her head and gave him a considering look. “Well then,” she said, “any suggestions for who I should take with me?” 

“Actually,” he said, “I've an idea.”

* * *

“She's an actual Valkyrie?” Thor failed to whisper, and Loki nodded seriously, half his attention focused on making sure Thor's words didn't reach the wrong audience. Not the rest of the Sakaaran bar, and especially not the Valkyrie herself, who would be more likely to break his teeth than tolerate the note of hero worship mixed with the nervousness in Thor's tone.

“She is.”

“She does not seem...very approachable,” Thor said with an uncharacteristic amount of trepidation. “Are you certain she won't just stab you?” 

“Not at all.” Loki shrugged. “But I've endured far worse.” 

“You would—” Thor looked at him as though he'd suggested something horrible, and Loki rolled his eyes. It was nothing to be dramatic about, nothing his brother hadn't known already. 

“I've got this,” Danvers said, and thankfully the confident assertion was enough to distract Thor, or at least convince him to look away. 

“She's a difficult one to persuade,” Loki said. “I've found that if—”

He cut off as Danvers strode over, leaning up against the bar and turning to face the Valkyrie. “Hey,” she said without preamble, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “What do you say we blow this popsicle stand?” 

Val looked her up and down, deceptively lazy, but Loki knew that even half-drunk off her ass, she was assessing. All the little details about the Kree woman that screamed she was formidable if not dangerous would have been tallied and noted. “I'm listening,” she said, and she leaned back, bottle still dangling limply from the fingers of one hand. 

“My friends and I,” she jerked her head back towards where they stood, “we're gonna kill Thanos. Thought you might like to come.” 

Val snorted. “Thanos is a myth. A story, to explain away some of the—” she waved a hand around, expansively “—general crappiness of the universe.” 

“I've got a lot of bodies that say otherwise,” Danvers said levely. “Civilians. Kids.” 

Val shook her head. “Not my problem.” 

“Never said it was. But,” she said, “it doesn't have to be. Your problem, I mean. Like you said, there's a lot of crappiness in the universe. Maybe it would be nice to,” she waved a hand, “find a bastard who has it coming and punch him in the face a few dozen times.”

The Valkyrie looked conflicted, and for a second Loki thought she would argue. Instead, her expression cleared, and she pushed herself up to her full height, dropping the bottle back on the counter with a solid ‘thunk’. 

“Well,” she said, “when you put it like that, how can I say no?”

Thor leaned over. “She's good,” he said. 

“Yes.” 

“Is it just me, or are the two of them together a little bit...” 

“Terrifying?” Loki suggested, and Thor nodded. “Absolutely.” 

* * *

Danvers came over a short while later, Valkyrie in tow. Val, for her part, gave the two of them a disdainful once-over before apparently dismissing them in favor of watching the crowd at the bar. 

“Hey guys,” Danvers said, “meet my friend Brunnhilde. She's gonna help us fight Thanos.” 

Loki half-choked, and beside him Thor did the same. In the past when he'd known her, the Valkyrie had escaped Sakaar with them, fought Hela and her undead army alongside them, and then lived with them for weeks in the stiflingly close and crowded interior of the _Statesman_ without once giving them her actual name. He hadn't asked—she didn't particularly like him, and even if she had she wasn't much for sharing—but if she had intended to tell them, there had been time. 

Yet she gave it willingly and near-immediately to a random Kree woman who picked her up in a bar on Sakaar. 

Thor, apparently recovered enough to speak, stammered beside him. “Brunnhilde? _The_ Brunnhilde, Captain of the Valkyror?” She faltered, taking a step back and looking a bit like she was considering changing her mind and bolting. Perhaps this, then, was why she hadn't mentioned it. “Is it true that you once singlehandedly brought down a Dark Elf warship on horseback?” 

She grimaced. “They've got a crystalline liquid that's a part of the power supply,” she said. “A weak point in the hull gives you access to the casing if you aim just right, just takes the whole thing down.”

“Like the Death Star,” Loki said. Danvers nodded. 

“The what?” 

He waved a hand. “Not important.”

Valkyrie— _Brunnhilde_ turned to Danvers. “Who exactly are these guys?” 

Danvers shrugged. “They're in on the whole Thanos-killing thing. We're putting together a team.” 

Brunnhilde answered with a raised eyebrow. “Who else is on this team?” 

“We're open to suggestions.” Her eyes swept the room, over the ragtag group in the Sakaaran bar. “Anyone here we should consider bringing?” 

Loki wanted to object; he'd had enough experience with Sakaar to suspect than anyone they dragged along would do more harm than help, but the Valkyrie shook her head. “This isn't exactly a recruiting ground for righteous crusaders,” she said. 

“Not sure that's what I'd call us,” she said, “but fair enough. No sense in hanging around, then.” 

Brunnhilde crossed her arms, but she followed when Danvers led them away, sauntering with loose, relaxed strides. Loki and Thor trailed after them, falling into step. “So, you guys have a ship or what?” 

“Kind of.” Danvers slowed to skirt around several piles of trash, while Brunnhilde picked her way over them easily, without hesitation. “We borrowed it from a friend of mine.” 

A half-moment later and the Quinnjet rose into view, still sitting where they had left it more, he expected, because no one had thought it worth stealing than because the location was particularly inconspicuous. Midgardian technology being what it was, the craft was not designed for interstellar travel, even when that only meant a quick trip through a wormhole. The metal bent and warped in odd places, scuffed and battered and noticeably worse for the wear. 

Brunnhilde swore. “You expect us to fly _that_ out of here?” 

“Yep.” Danvers clicked a small device, one that Fury had entrusted to her, specifically, and a door popped open. It moved more slowly and less smoothly than Loki suspected it had been designed to. “It looked better before the trip here, but it should hold up okay for one more jump.” 

Brunnhilde did not look convinced. “And if the engine dies halfway there, leaving us all stranded in the sorriest heap of junk I've seen in a good while? Full offense, I've spent the last few centuries on this trash heap and this deserves to stay here.”

“If that happens,” Danvers' smile showed a few too many teeth, “I'll get out and push.” 

“Holding you to that,” Brunnhilde said, and she climbed on board without looking back to see if the rest of them were still behind her. 

* * *

Danvers didn't have to push the ship, though it was a close thing. Their engines grumbled to a stop a little ways above the ground, and they dropped the last bit of distance, bounced once with a jolt that shook his teeth together, and slid to a stop. 

Fury's reaction to their return resembled his name, if his face was anything to go by, but Danvers remained unconcerned. “I think that went well,” she said, and he eyed the heap of battered metal that had once been his ship with a mixture of frustration and regret before he shook his head and let it go. She jerked a thumb behind her. “This is Brunnhilde. She's on board, which makes four people so far in the Thanos-killing party. Who else?” 

“I'd like to have an agent join you,” Fury said. 

Loki shook his head. “An ordinary Midgardian would have no chance at survival, however well trained in combat they may be,” he said. “Your bodies are too fragile.” 

Fury raised an eyebrow at that. “Who said anything about ordinary?” 

“Your best agents are Romanov and Barton,” he said bluntly. “Neither possesses weapons that could harm a Titan, nor the strength to wield them. Captain Rogers is stronger,” he said, ticking the options off on his fingers as he listed them, “but still significantly weaker than our enemy, and he lacks significant combat experience. Thanos has several lieutenants who could easily divest Stark of his armor, leaving him more helpless than the rest. The only one of your champions who could possibly aid in this fight,” he continued, “is Banner, and I doubt he would agree. Even if he did, I am not at all certain his beast would direct its rage at the enemy and not at us.”

Fury gave him the hardest look he'd gotten yet. “So who do you suggest we bring?” 

Loki hesitated. Many possibilities came to mind, and just as many reasons to refrain from recruiting those possibilities. “I am…unsure,” he admitted. 

“We have friends on Asgard,” Thor suggested. “Sif and the warriors three would readily join in on our quest.” 

Loki shook his head. “This isn't a hunting party or a quick jaunt to another realm to pick a fight with a few brigands.” 

“They are accomplished warriors,” Thor said. “They have faced real danger before, and can do so again.” 

“True,” Loki said, searching for a reason that didn't amount to simply not wanting them along. He hadn't forgiven their treason during his brief reign, their eagerness to threaten him when he was an unarmed prisoner, the stupid way they'd gone and gotten themselves killed during Hela's one-woman invasion of Asgard, haunting Thor with their absence in the brief time between their escape from Surtur and slaughter at the hands of Thanos. 

He didn't like them, but more than that he couldn't trust them not to betray him, to try and turn his brother against him, to get their fool selves killed in the fight so that in the unlikely circumstance that they won, their foolish deaths would be one more burden he need carry. 

“They are accomplished warriors,” he continued, “but to come to Midgard without Odin's leave is treason, and it's a treason they've committed once before. To one offense he may avert his eye, but two? To ignore such would be a sign of weakness in a king, and Odin would never allow himself to appear weak.” 

Thor frowned. “Perhaps if we ask Odin, he will allow them to join us,” he said. 

“And perhaps he will order us to return ourselves,” Loki pointed out. “What then? Would you disobey the Allfather's direct command?” 

Thor continued frowning, but didn't argue. “So no one from Asgard, then,” he said. “And you have rejected those of SHIELD, as well. Who would you have us bring?” 

It seemed it was Loki's turn to frown. He wavered, nearly speaking and then pulling back, considering the scant options available to them. There had been rumors, whispers that reached him on the Throne of Asgard of members of the Order who had rebelled against their father, but he believed that was some time in the future. He'd succeeded in recruiting Hela once, but explaining her to Thor would be thorny, and she and the Valkyrie would be at each other's throats before they could reach Thanos. Bringing a handful of Midgardians might act as a diversion, though he found the thought of leading them to their deaths unpleasant and doubted Thor would like the prospect any better than he did.

“What of the sorceress?” Thor asked when the silence had stretched on too long. Loki's confusion must have been evident, because Thor quickly clarified. “The one you mentioned before, who held the Time Stone. Surely one with the ability to wield one of the Stones would prove a useful ally?” 

Loki shook his head before he'd even fully processed the thought. “I cannot,” he said. “Some sort of failsafe prevents me coming near the Stone. Should I try, everything would only reset.” 

“But one of us could go,” Danvers said at the same moment the thought occurred to him. “There's nothing to stop the rest of us, right?” 

“I suppose not,” he said. 

“This better not cost me another plane,” Fury put in. “Where exactly is this Sorceress at?” 

“Hong Kong, typically,” Loki said. “But I suspect that just now she can be found in New York.” 

“I can fly,” Danvers offered.

“As can I,” Thor added. They made significant eye contact in a way that made Loki inwardly roll his eyes. “Perhaps we should send the faster among us to negotiate?” 

Danvers smirked. “You're on.” 

“Cool,” Brunnhilde said, “I'm going to see if I can find a bar.” 

Loki considered warning her about the weakness of Midgardian alcohol as she stalked off, but decided she would find out on her own soon enough. No need to be the one to break the news and earn her ire. 

Fury himself left a moment later, muttering about planes and budgets and respect. His departure left Loki alone with his thoughts, poor company as though they were. 

Because the truth was, Loki had much to think about, even if most of his thoughts were ones he'd rather avoid. 

Because, much as he hated to admit it, Thanos hadn't been wrong. Loki had lived out countless iterations of the same stretch of time, each stacked up against the next, and in every time, every version of events, the Titan had won. Sometimes later, too often sooner, but always, inevitably, like the return of the tide or the crash after a fall. 

He was inevitable, and Loki was tired. 

He couldn't say how much longer he could keep this up, how many more attempts he could endure, but he knew it was not many. Already he could feel the edges of his sanity fraying, coming apart like a woven cloth after a thread is snapped. Perhaps he already was not sane. Perhaps he hadn't been for a while now. 

And when he could try no longer, when finally the endless cycles reduced him to a gibbering mess unable to plot or plan or scheme or fight, where would that leave the universe? Trapped forever in a moment, unable to move forward, to progress beyond a single instant in time. 

If the world could not move forward, did that make this its end? The thought almost drew a bitter laugh from him, but he swallowed it down.

The sorceress, the one his companions went now to see, had accused him of being fated to set off Ragnarok, the end of the world. Ironic, then, that she should be the one to help him do it. 

Perhaps if Thanos had razed Midgard and continued on, someone, somewhere would have been able to stop him. They'd never get the chance, now. 

It was possible that, in his selfishness and overconfidence, he had doomed them all. 

He should feel guilt, perhaps. A better person would, certainly. _Thor_ would. Thor would allow it to eat at him from the inside and motivate him to do better, to find a way to undo whatever trouble he had caused or failed to prevent. 

Loki only felt weariness, a deep heaviness in his lungs and in his bones. 

He could not say how long he had been sitting, lost in thought, when a faint shower of sparks fell from the air in the center of the room. They fell from nothing, bright flashes that dissipated in the air like struck flint, and caught his attention. 

As he watched, the glow of the sparks intensified and then expanded, forming a ring. On the other side of the ring he could just see a different room, one with tall windows and more light than the SHIELD facility where he now sat. 

Most of the room, however, was blocked out by Thor, who stepped easily through the portal with Danvers beside him. A shorter, stocky Midgardian followed, dismissing the portal with a wave of his hand.

“She would not come herself,” Thor said by way of explanation, “but she sent a trusted lieutenant to accompany us.” 

The Midgardian raised one hand in a small wave. “Wong,” he said, and Loki nodded his acknowledgement. 

He didn't recognize the man; perhaps he had been dead already in the timeline where he'd visited the Sanctum, or perhaps he'd been elsewhere, still waging a fruitless, doomed war against Thanos' armies.

The door at the far end of the room slammed open and they all tensed, but it was only Brunnhilde, waving a bottle in one hand and wearing an irate expression. 

“What is this,” she said, “water that's seen alcohol sometime in the long distant past? Did it hear bedtime stories about proper booze once upon a time? Did the truck it came on drive by a distillery at a distance of a few thousand yards?” 

The new arrival, Wong, looked her up and down, taking in the agitation, the danger in the way she moved, the open bottle of alcohol in one hand. “If you don't like it,” he said in a calm, sensible voice, “you don't have to drink it.” 

She met his eyes, and for a second tension hung thick in the air before she finally shrugged. “Just because it's bad doesn't mean it's not better than nothing,” she said at last. 

He nodded. “Many things in life work that way.” His voice took on a vaguely singsong quality, as though he were quoting a parable. “Anything's better than nothing.” 

She raised an eyebrow, skeptical. “Is that from some book of supposedly-wise sayings by an old wise sage or something?” 

“Dolly Parton,” he said, expression unreadable.

The name sounded vaguely familiar; Loki was still trying to place it when Thor caught his attention, hovering conspicuously in a way that meant he was deciding whether to say something Loki wouldn't like to hear. He turned to face him on the principle that getting whatever it was out of the way would be less painful than dragging it out. 

“Brother,” Thor said at last, and the unease in his voice set Loki further on edge. “I would speak with you for a moment, alone.” 

He sighed. “Can it wait?”

“No,” Thor said decisively, and Loki waved for him to follow. He could navigate the bunker in his sleep, now, so he took them in unerring steps to the roof of the building, which sat at an unimpressive height given that most of the facility was underground. 

“What is it?” he asked when they trailed to a halt, and Thor took a second to gather himself before he answered. 

“I think you should stay behind,” Thor said quietly. Loki pulled back as though he'd been slapped; it felt a little like he had. Were it not for the uncomfortable seriousness with which Thor regarded him, he would ask if his brother was joking. “I know,” Thor said, “it is much to ask of you, but it would put my mind at ease to have you here and safe.”

He shook his head, and Thor frowned. “It isn't as though I would be going alone,” he insisted. “There's even a Valkyrie coming along, and several other impressive warriors as well; all of us against one Titan should not be so great a challenge.”

“I have to come,” he said stubbornly, a well of panic rising up inside him. “I must. You cannot leave me here.” 

“You've done enough, brother,” Thor said, hatefully gentle. One hand reached out, almost tentatively, to rest on his shoulder. “And besides, you're in no shape to face the Mad Titan. Let us handle this.” 

“No,” he said, and caught Thor's arm, looking him straight in the eyes. “I _have_ to be there, because when something goes wrong, again, I am the only one who can learn from it. Don't you see? We'll do this again and again and again, and if it can be done I have to be there to figure out _how_.”

Thor studied him, then nodded, reluctantly. “Just...promise me,” he said, “that you are not—that you do not simply have a death wish.” His eyes pleaded, begging for reassurance he wasn't sure he could give. 

Loki chuckled, a dry mirthless sound that lodged in his throat. “I've died already, more times than I can count. Believe me, if it was going to stick, it would have. Besides,” he said as Thor continued to watch him unhappily. “I'm not entirely certain that when this whole thing is over, I won't slit my own throat just to get some peace.” 

“You don't mean that,” Thor said, but fell silent when he met his eyes. “I won't let that happen,” he swore instead, grabbing Loki's arm and squeezing so hard it hurt. 

“And what do you think you're going to do, Thor? You won't _know_. By the time we get to that point you, or at least this you, won't even _exist_. You'll have forgotten this conversation entirely, or we'll have never had it.” 

There was something new shining in Thor's eyes, past the disappointment and the shock and the hurt. _Fear_. Thor was _scared_. “Why should it matter to you?” Loki asked. “You won't be the one dealing with it. It'll be some other Thor, one that might not even care about all of this.”

“Brother,” Thor said slowly, more carefully than he'd ever seen his brother choose his words. “I know that I speak for every possible version of myself when I say that something like that—you must not.” His voice faltered, broke. Thor was _crying_. “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me that whatever happens, whatever version of events you live, you will come back when all this is over. That you will survive this and you will come back to me, or whatever version of me is there.”

The hand that wasn't on his arm made its way up to cup his neck, and the eyes that met his were desperate, pleading. 

“I—I shall do my best,” he said, overwhelmed at the raw display of emotion. 

Thor leaned forward until their foreheads rested together, his hands still gripping harder than was comfortable, as though he was afraid of what might happen if he let go. “Then I shall be satisfied,” Thor said, “because I know you, brother, and whatever you set your mind to shall be done.”

That caught in his throat for a second, and it took him a moment longer to realize _why_. 

He'd spent _years_ craving this sort of recognition from Thor. Decades. Centuries. There was a time he'd have cut off his own right hand to hear Thor acknowledge his capabilities in the way he just had. 

Now, after everything, when it came it felt very nearly hollow, Thor's faith only another burden he must carry. 

At least in this, if he disappointed Thor he'd not be around to ache with it. 

“We should rejoin the others,” he said after a moment, when he'd managed to wrestle whatever he was feeling far enough under control that it wouldn't show in his face. 

Thor rested a hand in his shoulder and squeezed, tight enough to make Loki wonder what he thought might happen if he let go. 

“Well then,” he said at last, “lets go.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience with how long this last chapter took! I'm very excited to share the finish and I hope you enjoy it! 
> 
> Thank you to worstloki, who is awesome and helped me edit this into what is hopefully coherency, and to NimbusLlewelyn, who helpful pointed out that Mar-vell is, in fact, not Carol Danvers but Lawson. I've went back and changed that around for accuracy's sake.
> 
> And thank you to everyone reading; I appreciate you!

“There they are,” Danvers said when they re-emerged, “I was starting to think we'd have to leave without you.”

“We could catch up,” Thor said easily.

“Our race earlier suggests otherwise.” 

“It's difficult to run off without knowing where it is you are going,” Loki put in before whatever competitive argument was brewing in Thor's displeased look erupted. 

“True,” she said. “Anyone else we need to go charm into joining team Titan Killers before we're good to go?” 

Loki shook his head. “I can think of no one else who would be suitable.” 

Danvers shrugged. “It's still five against one, and Brunnhilde and I are pretty badass. I like our odds.” 

If the silence that stretched after her declaration bothered her, she gave no sign of it.

“So this is actually the plan?” Brunnhilde asked at last. “All the universe is at stake, and the best we could round up was a couple of Odin's kids, a hot blond, an alcoholic scrapper and a human doing magic tricks?” 

“Having second thoughts?”

“I'm just saying,” Brunnhilde continued, “there has to be someone better for this.” 

“There always is,” the sorcerer, Wong, said from where he stood a bit off to one side. “Somewhere out there, there is almost certainly someone who could do a better job, but they are not here to do it. We are.”

Thor nodded. “Well said.”

“Are we ready to go, then?”

No one agreed, but no one argued, either, which answered the question in of itself.

Loki took a deep breath, considered making an excuse, and swallowed it down. He could think of nothing productive that could be done to significantly increase their chance of success, so stalling would serve no purpose. 

“I can take us there,” he said quietly. “We need to be in contact.” 

“Like we all need to hold hands?” Brunnhilde looked skeptical and Danvers snorted, but they slipped their hands together without further complaint. Thor took the Valkyrie's other hand and dropped his other on Loki's shoulder, squeezing with an amount of force that should have been irritating but in his current nervous state was mostly comforting. A second later, the wizard rested a hand on Danvers' other shoulder, and Loki closed his eyes and dipped his head.

The Tesseract pulled them along easily as ever, and when he felt Thor's hand drop from his shoulder to reach for a weapon, he opened his eyes once more. 

It took a second for the scene to fully register, and when it did, his stomach dropped further. 

In the past, he'd sometimes caught Thanos alone when he came and attempted to kill him. Other times, one or two of the Black Order had been in evidence, receiving orders or delivering news. 

Today, though, it looked as though they'd stumbled on a meeting. Or, his mind supplied when he recognized the space, perhaps a war counsel; it had been here, in this place of carved-out stone and sulking shadows, roofless and open to the void, where his own invasion of Midgard had been planned. 

Whatever now stood in progress, the entirety of the Black Order turned to face the sudden intrusion, all of Thanos' children together in one place. Surprise quickly faded to hostility as they caught sight of the little group, and Loki's mind raced ahead of itself, wondering how he would put their party back together a second time, and if doing so would be worth the effort. 

Thanos, at the far end of the clearing, only studied them as they approached. Unlike his children, when he stood to his feet the motion was leisurely, unconcerned. 

Loki's thoughts and half-formed plans were interrupted by a voice that cut through the startled silence. “We're looking for a genocidal warlord,” Danvers said, and Loki almost flinched at the flippant confidence her voice still held. “Anyone in favor of wiping out whole planets, raise your hand.” 

The Black Order, as a single unit, drew their weapons. The small sounds of steel and synthetic leather echoed off the stone walls, amplified in the otherwise still air.

“Well I guess that answers that,” she said, and raised her hands. Her skin began to glow, starting at her knuckles and creeping up her arms, a bright white light that crackled through the air in a way similar to, but less organic than, the familiar sparks of Thor's lightning. 

Next to her, Brunnhilde drew her sword, and Thor already had Mjolnir raised and ready to throw. Wong waved his arms in a sweeping, dramatic motion, then fell into a fighting crouch with a spell wrapped around each fist. 

Loki felt himself drop into a crouch as well. The Tesseract he let fall into a pocket of Spacetime; it would be of little use in a fight, and he didn't relish the thought of losing it in the scuffle. A twist of the wrist and his daggers dropped into his hands, ready to strike. Doomed or no, he would at least put up a fight. 

The two groups moved at almost the same time, rushing toward each other, but before they even drew close the ground shifted and lurched beneath their feet. Ebony Maw's arms shot into the air and a sheet of solid stone followed, rising up out of the ground like a tidal wave and threatening to sweep over them. 

A second later the stone exploded to shards, crumbling in a flash of white light as Danvers raised her fists. Sharp bits of stone rained down on them, and Loki threw up a thin shield to keep the edges from slicing through skin. 

The next uprising from the stone was more targeted, a sharp spike aimed straight for Danvers, and she only just dodged, rising above it and blasting the formation to splinters before it could finish forming. The next blast was aimed straight for Maw, and he had to raise a shield up from the ground to keep from being incinerated. 

The battle continued, drawing the two of them further from the group, and the rest of the Order closed the distance between them. Cull Obsidian roared as he charged forward, and Thor screamed back as he met that charge, swinging his hammer wildly. Brunnhilde and Proxima Midnight eyed each other and started to circle before crossing swords, and Nebula fell behind her sister, watching for an opening. Wong fell back, lifting a magically-conjured shield to block a strike from Corvus Glaive. A wave of his hand and a portal opened beneath Glaive's feet, but before he could fall stone flowed over the gap. Maw grinned from where he and Mar-Vell still fought. 

Loki watched Thanos. The Titan surveyed the field, making no move to join in even as his children fought. Beside him, his favorite daughter, Gamora, stood; she had tried to rush forward with the others, but a wave of Thanos' hand had stopped her. Now she, too, surveyed the battle, expression frustrated and with one hand still resting on her sword. 

The thoughtful expression on Thanos' face turned decisive. He pointed across the room, and both Loki and Gamora followed the gesture to a command panel located on one wall. “Activate the transporter,” he said, and Gamora blinked in surprise before she nodded. 

Loki moved almost on instinct, catching a blow that might've decapitated Wong and sending Glaive stumbling back, but his thoughts spun. Thanos meant to _flee_ , and while chasing him off might be a sort of victory, they couldn't afford to let him disappear and regroup. In the short term, they might win, but it spelled disaster for the long term. 

Wong used the opening Loki created for him to strike, not at Glaive, but at Midnight, whose circling had brought her within range. One whip of magic wrapped around her leg and the other curled around her throat, yanking her off-balance; Brunnhilde didn't hesitate to move in and finish their fight. 

The first member of the Order had fallen. A flash of hope surged through his bones; maybe, if the fight lasted long enough, they'd stand a chance. 

Brunnhilde and Wong didn't hesitate to turn their attention back to Glaive, but Loki threw himself after Gamora, who had taken off at a run towards the control panel. 

He didn't quite have it in him to conjure a full wall, but he created a small barrier at the level of her feet. They tangled and she went flying, barely managing to roll out of the fall. 

Loki pressed the advantage, but before he could strike a barely-felt movement of air behind him warned him to move. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Nebula aiming to thrust a vicious-looking knife between his ribs. 

He aborted the attack and instead threw himself forward, angling himself so he was between both sisters and the control panel. 

With what he'd seen from the rest of the Order, he expected the sisters to rush him and attempt to push their way through with brute force and braced himself accordingly. Instead, though, they fell back just out of range of his knives, separating enough that to face one would leave him open to an attack from the other. A wise strategy, and frustrating. For all he'd hated to be underestimated, at the moment it would have been useful. 

Nebula moved first, a quick, testing strike he barely had to move to parry. Gamora watched, taking his measure, hunting for weaknesses in his guard. He had her full attention, both of their attention; perhaps there was something he could do with that. 

“You don't have to do this,” he said quietly. “We mean to kill Thanos, nothing more, nothing less. If you stand aside you will be spared.” 

It was Gamora who struck next, a quick flurry of blows that drove him a step back. Nebula managed to catch him a bruising strike with the hilt of her dagger, driving into his ribs with enough blunt force to drive the air from his lungs.

“Offering us a chance to surrender?” Nebula's tone was almost flippant for all that her concentration stayed sharp as her sword. “Thanks but no thanks.”

Somewhere at their periphery, Thor had become aware of his predicament; Loki could just see it out of the corner of his eye, a worried look that almost cost him his footing when Cull Obsidian drove forward, and then a redoubled frenzy of effort in attempt to finish his opponent off. 

Loki's attention snapped back to his own duel long enough for him to direct a quick backhanded slash at Nebula, and the speed with which she danced back was gratifying. 

“That's not exactly what I meant,” he said, and looked at Gamora, who hadn't spoken. He knew little more of her than rumors, but rumor had suggested that she'd betrayed Thanos once before, in a different time, not too long from now. 

“What, then? A chance to join your pretty band of brigands?” Nebula attacked again, but Gamora remained notably passive, hanging back with a calculating look on her face.

“We're offering you a chance at a life, at a future free from _him_.” He punctuated the words with a sharp burst of magic that knocked both sisters a step back and sent a sharp needle of dizzy pain lancing through his skull. Despite everything he'd endured since, because of the loop his body and his seidr were barely more than a day removed from his time in Sanctuary, and both ached with barely-healed scars. 

The strike that he followed up with was barely deflected before it could drive into Gamora's heart, and even so it came close enough to slice through the fabric over her ribs. “All we ask in return is that you do nothing.”

“Shut up!” Nebula snarled, and lunged. 

But Gamora glanced behind her, uncertain, to where a blow from Danvers pushed Thanos back another step. “Others have tried,” she said, the words only halfway a question. “All have failed.” Her tone was just neutral enough to be mistaken for a declaration of faith in the strength of their cause, for those who would wish to interpret it that way. 

Or perhaps that's what it was, and he was the one doing the wishful thinking. He blocked the blow, staggered with it, and used a small pulse of his waning magic to shove her back. 

“And we'll keep trying,” he said. “We'll try as many times as we have to, die if we must, because as long as we are still fighting we have not lost.” 

“Or,” she said, “you'll die and it will mean nothing, like the deaths of others who tried and failed to stop him.”

“I'd gladly risk death for the chance at a future worth living in,” he said, and he thought he might mean it even if death were a concept that still held any fear for him. “Imagine it. You could be free, Daughter of Thanos. Free of his will, his purpose, his shadow.” 

Nebula lunged like a striking snake, aiming for the center of his chest, and something he said must have struck a nerve, because the attack carried more anger than precision. He knocked it aside easily. 

“He's my father,” Gamora said, and he heard in those words the echo of his past self, the undeserved loyalty, the desire for approval tempered with doubt. 

“And has he earned that name?” he asked viciously, swinging high for the throat. She caught the blade, twisted. “I've seen how he treats his _children_. Are you willing to sacrifice all others for his sake? Is there truly no one more worthy of your loyalty?” 

Thor finally, _finally_ found his opening, and Cull Obsidian staggered and fell under the blow. He looked up just in time to see Loki misstep, catching a slash aimed for the femoral artery with both blades as Nebula lunged towards his unprotected other side. 

Her sword arced towards his neck; his hands were too low, too tangled up in the block to parry the strike. He could duck, but that would let her slip behind him, and once the transport was initiated Thanos could be anywhere, free to hide and scheme and come back stronger when they least expected. 

She'd do the same if she killed him, of course, but it would slow her down, and Thor was already rushing towards their position with a speed probably born of panic. 

They could do this. They were so _close_ , closer than he'd ever been, and he could not risk it. He stood his ground. 

A block caught the slash at the last second, the ring of metal on metal loud enough to make him flinch. 

“Gamora?” Nebula's oddly synthetic voice sounded hurt, betrayed. “What are you doing?” She kicked out, but her sister pulled with the motion, twisting so that she stood between her and the console. 

“He's right,” she said, drawing herself up. “Thanos doesn't deserve our loyalty. His plan is insane.”

“So now you're going to take _his_ word on this.” Nebula seemed to regrip, falling back into her fighting posture but with her eyes now fixed on her sister. 

“I already knew,” Gamora said. “I think I always knew, but lately—I've been looking for a way out.”

Nebula' s expression wavered between incredulity and frustration before tipping towards anger. “Then _you_ are a traitor!” 

Nebula threw herself forward, Gamora moved to intercept, and then they were rolling together, grappling with more ferocity than strategy. It was a dance he knew well, aggression and anger and the underlying familiarity of a fight between family. 

He didn't have time to watch, though; the fight against Thanos continued, and every second it stretched on was a chance for the Titan to gain the upper hand. 

Thor reached him a second later and grabbed his arm with a grip that would no doubt add to his growing collection of bruises, but even he could tell this wasn't the time for a lecture. That would come later, and Loki might even dread it if he could convince himself there would be a later to dread. 

For now, though, they turned back to the fight together. 

Cull Obsidian had fallen, and so had Proxima Midnight, but Glaive and the Maw still battled on. More importantly, though, Thanos had finally joined the fight himself. The Titan held a sword in each hand, each the size of any given member of their team, and he moved with a speed that was entirely unfair for someone of his size.

As they moved to rejoin the fight he swung a sword at Danvers, and even with half an eye still on Maw she managed to catch it in one hand, pinching it between her fingers to bring its momentum to a stop before the blade could reach her palm. Thanos drove downward and she pushed back, at least until the knuckles of his other hand drove into her ribs, knocking her back into the far wall. 

Maw pressed the advantage, only to stop to duck when a glowing orange discus-shaped spell nearly decapitated him. As he whirled on Wong Loki threw himself into the fight, locking his hands around Maw's head from behind. He could feel the magic reaching for him, attempting to draw him into a mental battle he had fought before, lost before. Despair and hatred and anger battled within him. 

He pushed back, shoving away the intrusion for the split-second he could manage and using the borrowed time to twist viciously, his hands still clamped tight around his enemy's skull. There was a snap and the pressure on his mind eased as the body in his hands went limp; he released it, let it fall. 

He hadn't seen what happened to Corvus Glaive but the man was dead, sprawled on the ground a few yards from them, leaving Thanos to fight alone. Which he did, huge and towering, swinging the one sword he still held with a wild, jubilant precision. If the death of so many of his children bothered him beyond his annoyance at the inconvenience, he didn't show it. 

Loki caught sight of Thor a half-moment later, picking himself up off the ground a little ways away and calling his hammer. A small cut had opened up above one eye and he held his left arm gingerly, but he threw himself back at the Titan without hesitation. 

He knocked Thanos' sword aside and the next instant was caught and lifted by the front of his armor, an image that sent panicked thoughts, half-memory, racing through Loki's skull. 

Without hesitating, he threw himself after Thor, but Brunnhilde was closer and her years on Sakaar hadn't dulled her reflexes. Thanos howled and dropped Thor as Dragonfang bit into his arm, then he jerked it back, ripping the hilt out of her hands and sending it clattering across the stone floor. 

He threw himself towards Thanos again in the instant of distraction that followed, just barely in time to keep the Titan from decapitating the Valkyrie with a sweep of his sword. She returned the favor a second later, a sharp kick to Thanos' elbow sending his second sword to the ground and giving them both just enough time to scramble back. 

Behind them, Danvers pushed her way out of the small crater Thanos had driven her into.

She had one hand tight about her ribs, her glowing face pinched in a tight grimace, because apparently, for all her power, she was not invulnerable. The other hand, though, came up, and a blast of glowing energy knocked Thanos back into the wall. Not enough to stop him, not nearly enough. 

But enough that Wong had time to lash out with a whip of glowing orange energy that wrapped itself around one wrist, pinning it out and away before he could retrieve his sword. 

Enough that Loki could reach out with his own magic and pin the other. The bonds of green seidr were not strong enough to hold for long, but then, they didn't have to be. 

Just long enough for Thor to dive for the Valkyrie's sword, Dragonfang, in the corner where it had fallen. 

Long enough for him to toss it, expertly, to its rightful wielder, who caught it in a steady hand. 

Long enough for Brunnhilde to spin with it and neatly, expertly, separate Thanos' head from his body. 

The room went silent. Thanos toppled slowly, the muted crash as he fell the only sound other than their own ragged breathing. 

Loki took deep, shuddering breaths, staring down at Thanos' motionless corpse. It was _over_. It was _finally_ over.

Thanos was _dead_ , and not ever coming back.

It hit him all at once, disbelief and denial fading away as he realized that never again would he have to do this, to start over, to live through this same tortured stretch of time alone with the knowledge that no one else would remember.

He tried to laugh, but with the swirling emotions that left him feeling overfull, ready to split, it came out choked. He becames suddenly aware of the thinness of the air, and suddenly he was gasping, struggling for breath.

His eyes filled, and before he realized he found himself on his knees, choking on shuddering gasps that weren't quite sobs. They came bubbling out of him, out of the overflow of tension and emotion he'd had no chance to express, and he told himself he needed to _stop_ , that people would _remember_ this, but it made no difference. He hated himself for his weakness, but he couldn't pull himself back together just yet.

It took a few more moments before he was aware he wasn't alone, that there were arms around him and squeezing tight, and it wasn't only the force of his violent tears that made it hard to breathe. He clung to Thor's shirt, grabbing fistfuls of the fabric and holding on tight like he'd never let go.

“Shhh,” Thor was saying. “It's okay. You're okay. It's over, Loki, it's over.” From the way his voice trembled, Loki wasn't the only one crying.

He took a deep breath to steady himself and pulled back enough to look at his brother. Thor's eyes were rimmed with red and shining.

Brunnhilde took a step forward, limping a little now that the battle was over, and pulled Danvers to her feet. “You were right,” she said, and her grin was triumphant even if it was a little bit haunted still. “That was cathartic.” 

Danvers choked on a little half-laugh, and clutched her ribs tighter. She stood with her weight on her own feet, though, which probably meant she was healing already. 

Wong stood off to the other side, breathing heavily but apparently unhurt. Danvers caught his eye and frowned. “Hey,” she said, “aren't you human? How come you aren't more banged up like the rest of us?” 

“I didn't let them hit me,” he said, as though it was obvious and she was foolish for asking. Brunnhilde snorted in amusement. 

Loki took deep breaths, forcing them to steady. His vision cleared more and more, slowly, and then a small, broken sound caught his attention. He turned back towards where the controls for the transport had been and met Gamora's eyes. The Titan's daughter met his gaze with one that was steady, an unreadable emotion dancing behind the mask of calm she wore. 

She held her sister, who had deflated enough that she almost looked small. Who was staring with wide, blank eyes, looking for all the world as though her very foundation had been pulled out from underneath her. Like a person who had suddenly and unexpectedly lost their purpose, and could not even muster the energy to react. 

Loki could relate. 

“Shh,” Gamora said, and her hand traced small circles on her sister's back. “It's okay, Nebula, it's okay.” She took a deep breath, let it out unsteadily. “We're okay. We've got each other, and there's nothing we can't do. We can leave, _together_ , go anywhere and no one can stop us.” 

She was crying, now, they were both crying, from shock more than any other reason, he would guess, and Loki pulled his eyes away. He couldn't give them privacy, here in this open room, but they deserved the dignity of pretense. 

“So what now, brother?” Thor stood, and offered a hand to pull him to his feet. His legs felt light and unsteady, and if it weren't for Thor's continued grip on his elbow he might have fallen back down. 

“I don't know,” he said, and he shouldn't feel this panicked, should he, when they'd finally won? “I don't know. I didn't—I never planned for this. For what came after.” 

“Let me bring you home,” Thor said, earnestly, and he shook his head. 

“Not Asgard,” he said. “It never ends well, going back. Nothing good has come of it. Not once.” 

Thor looked pained, at that, almost like he wanted to start crying again, but he nodded. “Midgard, then?” 

He sniffled, and _Norns_ was this embarrassing. “Odin would never allow it.” 

“I don't know.” Thor's voice was still rough, but it held a note of mischief that made him look up. “The scary lady over here made it sound like she might take the Tesseract.” He glanced over to Danvers, who smirked back. “If that were to happen, I'm not so sure we could stop her. We'd have no choice but to wait until the good people back in Asgard repair the Bifrost.”

Loki tried to laugh; it came out choked. He summoned the Tesseract and held it out, fingers shaking. 

Danvers took it and turned it over, expression unreadable. “You might want to use this to take us back first,” she said, and offered it back. 

“No need.” The sorcerer, Wong, stretched one arm out, twisting his fingers and then sweeping his arm in a wide, circular motion. A glowing portal appeared then widened, the other side so bright against the gloom of Sanctuary it was nearly blinding. 

“Seriously?” Brunnhilde looked like she wanted to punch somebody, and that somebody, by a thin margin that could easily shift, was currently Wong. “You couldn't have done that before?” 

“Show-off,” Loki muttered. 

He looked to Gamora one more time. She nodded, and he found himself hesitating. 

“You can come with us, if you want.” Danvers jerked her chin towards the open portal, giving the sisters a significant look. Gamora shook her head. 

“Someone needs to tie up the loose ends here,” she said. “Fa—Thanos has others locked in the cells below.” Loki stiffened, and Thor's hand on his arm tightened. He swallowed as Gamora continued talking. “We can free them. Bring them home. Undo at least a little of the harm we helped him commit, together.”

Nebula didn't agree or disagree, still staring into space. Loki suspected things wouldn't be pretty when she came to herself. 

Danvers nodded, and as they moved back, Wong jerked his head towards the portal in an impatient gesture. Brunnhilde stepped through, then Danvers, then Thor. Loki took a deep breath and followed them into the sunlight. 

* * *

He didn't recognize the room they stepped into, at first. The windows of the sanctum were clean and whole, the sky outside blue and bright with sunshine. The air held the unmistakable crisp undertones of young magic. 

“So,” came a voice from behind, and Loki turned to face her. The Ancient One. “You've come back.” 

He expected to find her addressing Wong, but instead she looked directly at him. “I have,” he said, and for a second he worried the proximity might trigger the failsafe. The thought of going through this _again_ , of having the hard-won victory yanked out from under them at this last moment made his stomach twist with dread, but nothing happened. 

“You've walked a long road,” she said, and narrowed her eyes. 

“Indeed.” The understatement made him want to laugh, but he feared that if he allowed a single emotion free they would all continue to bubble to the surface, pouring out and viciously destroying whatever dignity he might have left. 

Behind him, he could just hear Brunnhilde mutter “The Hel is she talking about?” 

“It seems the stories were wrong, after all,” she said. A small, enigmatic smile passed over her lips like a shadow. “Perhaps you'll take this chance to write a new one.” 

Something tightened in his throat. At his sides, his hands balled into fists, but he kept his expression carefully steady. 

“Fate offers such chances only rarely,” she said finally. “See that you make the most of it.” 

He nodded, short, sharp, controlled. By the time he raised his eyes back up she was gone. 

Wong sighed. “Always so dramatic,” he said, and twisted his fingers to bring another sparkling portal to life. “Let's go tell the Director of SHIELD that we're back.” 

This time, the portal took them to an office, the space improbably dark despite the tall windows that framed the desk. The desk where Fury sat, scowling as though his reaction to their sudden and unorthodox appearance had skipped straight over surprise and right to irritation. 

“Ever heard of knocking?” he said, still scowling. Wong, without changing his expression, reached out and mimed knocking on the empty air. 

“What, you aren't going to ask us how it went?” Danvers gave him a weak version of her usual overconfident smirk, and he raised an eyebrow in response. 

“I'll bite,” Fury said, eyeing them each in turn. “How did it go?” 

She gave him a tired thumbs up. “We killed space Hitler,” she said. “You're welcome.”

“Just like that, huh?” 

Brunnhilde snorted, but it was Thor who said “I assure you, it was not easy.” 

“It was a little easy,” Wong said, and the rest of them gave him a sideways look. 

“So the Earth is safe now?” Fury continued. “There's no one gonna show up and try to avenge this...Thanos.” 

“No and yes,” Loki said. “His daughter came to our aid, and has dedicated herself to undoing some of her father's cruelties. I very much doubt there are any others with an interest in seeking vengeance.” 

“What about the no? Why aren't we safe?” 

“Nothing is ever safe,” he said, and Fury hummed. 

“That,” he said, “is unfortunately true.”

The director walked over to a side table, unstoppered a bottle, and poured himself a small amount of what was within. 

He drained the glass, set it down, and twisted it thoughtfully before he turned back to face them. 

“There was an idea,” he said, eyeing each of them in turn, “to bring together a group of remarkable people. See if they could be something more.” 

“The Avengers,” Loki said, and he wanted to laugh, or maybe throw up. 

The first time this group had been put together, it had been specifically to stop _him_. The irony of this, now, it didn't escape him. 

“Yes,” Fury said, and gave him a small sideways look before continuing. Danvers, for some unfathomable reason, looked suddenly very smug. “If the events of the past couple of days have taught us anything, it's that Earth isn't ready for whatever threats are out there. We'd like to do something to remedy that. Now I don't know most of you,” he leveled Loki in particular a harsh look, which seemed unfair but could hardly phase him after everything, “but Captain Danvers here seems to trust you, and I trust her judgment implicitly. You've all earned a spot on this team, should you choose to accept it.” 

“We do,” Thor said, dropping a hand onto Loki's shoulder. He glared, but didn't contradict his brother, and Fury nodded. 

“I expect to hear everything you know about the Hydra threat within SHIELD,” he said, “and you're going to tell us where this information came from, if you want any chance of me trusting you.” 

“I doubt you'd believe it,” Loki said, a little unsteadily. 

“Look around the room. I'm prepared to believe a whole lot right now.” He turned to the Valkyrie. “And what about you? Lady with a sword.”

She shrugged. “It's not as if I can go back to Sakaar. I'm going to need something to do.”

“All right. The lady with the sword is on board.” He nodded to himself, then took a deep breath, as though he thought he might be making a huge mistake but was determined to power through. “How about you? What's your thing?” 

Wong looked faintly offended. “I am a Master of Sorcery.” 

“Do you want to be a master of sorcery for the Avengers' Initiative?” 

He paused. “I already have a duty to protect the Earth from threats from the Dark Dimensions,” he said carefully. 

“That wasn't a no,” Fury pointed out. 

He turned to Loki. “Tell me,” he said, “what do I do in the futures you've witnessed?” 

“The Ancient One recruits an arrogant bastard with next to no experience and promotes him to your superior almost immediately afterwards,” Loki said. Technically, it was true, even if the unflattering description of Strange might be motivated by residual bitterness over that thirty-minute fall. A bit. 

Wong looked irritated, but not doubtful. “I am pleased to join the Avengers Initiative,” he said. Fury nodded. “Though there are some books I will miss,” he added. 

Books, not people. Loki thought he might make a friend. “Would it be possible to steal them?” he asked, and Wong gave him a sideways look. 

“It would be incredibly difficult,” he said. 

“Now that just sounds like a challenge.” 

“I'm not hearing this.” Fury gave them a sharp look, and they exchanged one more meaningful glance before subsiding. “And one more thing. I'm gonna need the Tesseract back.” 

“I can't do that,” Loki said. Fury crossed his arms. “Because she has it.” He pointed, and Danvers shrugged. 

“And I'm keeping it,” Danvers added. “Sorry, Fury.” 

“Really?” 

She nodded. “'Fraid so. It sounds like Earth isn't ready for it.” 

He closed his one eye and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You lot are not going to make this easy on me,” he said, sounding vaguely like he was nursing the beginning of a headache. 

“Yeah, well, I hate to break it to you, but teams aren't easy,” Brunnhilde said. 

“I can get behind that.” Danvers nodded her agreement. 

“I have to agree,” Wong said, “but it is worse when they are sorcerers. Sorcerers are all at least a little insufferable.” 

Loki frowned. Perhaps they wouldn't get along, after all. 

Ah well, time would tell. 

Time. Time, which was now finally, _finally_ set to rights and moving only in the forward direction. And somehow he'd come out of it free, or at least, as free as he'd ever been. Free to do whatever he pleased. Free to start over. 

Free to write a new story, and free to decide for himself what role in that story he played. 

He had his brother by his side, and a collection of people who just might, if he played his cards right, become friends. 

The possibilities were endless. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end!
> 
> As a final note, I do have a short little follow-up written that I should be posting soon, but I'm planning to post it as its own fic in this series. If you want to see that, I don't think you'll get a notification unless you're subscribed to the series or this user account. Just a heads up!


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